IRONY AND AGONY, SIDE BY SIDE ON MY PIANO KEYS: Gravity & Waggery (aka Claw of the Conciliator--admit it, the man can pick blog titles!) brings a fun challenge: Pick ten passages from the Bible which are especially meaningful or striking to you. I did this more or less off the top of my head--ask me tomorrow, and the answers might be somewhat different--and included a bonus at the end, plus the post below this one, because the Bible doesn't say I have to work in base 10. If you guys do this, link back to me so I can find you!--I'd love to see other people's.

10. Matthew 1:1-6: The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers, and Judah the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar, and Perez the father of Hezron, and Hezron the father of Ram, and Ram the father of Amminadab, and Amminadab the father of Nahshon, and Nahshon the father of Salmon, and Salmon the father of Boaz by Rahab, and Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth, and Obed the father of Jesse, and Jesse the father of David the king.

And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah....
-----------
Because all the women mentioned in Jesus' genealogy are foreigners or adulteresses. Women are brought in specifically to link Jesus to the "other." Hegel's "woman as the irony of the community" again....

9. Psalms 22:14: I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint;
my heart is wax, it is melted within my breast....

8. John 1:1: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

7. Romans 6:4: Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from death by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.
--------------------
For whatever reason, almost every short story I write (not the novels) turns out to be about death--whether death as an object for philosophy, death as an occasion for guilt-stricken grief, death as an obstacle or death as a doorway. I honestly have no idea why this obsesses me so much. But I know one reason baptism makes sense to me is that it is baptism into the Crucifixion in order to be baptism into the Resurrection.

6. Genesis 8:21: And when the Lord smelled the pleasing odor, the Lord said in his heart, "I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done."
----------------------
Because I think about this a lot. (This is the political entry.)

5. Song of Songs 2:4: He brought me to the banqueting house,
and his banner over me was love.
[and also 3:1-3: Upon my bed by night
I sought him whom my soul loves;
I sought him, but found him not;
I called him, but he gave no answer.
"I will rise now and go about the city,
in the streets and in the squares;
I will seek him whom my soul loves."
I sought him, but found him not.
The watchmen found me,
as they went about in the city.
"Have you seen him whom my soul loves?"]

4. Luke 24:35: Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he was known to them in the breaking of the bread.
-----------------
One of the epigraphs for the next novel. (The other one is from Audre Lorde's autobiography--from memory, it's something like, "It is the final dream of children to remain forever untouched.")

3. Psalms 42:1-2: As a hart longs for flowing streams,
so longs my soul for thee, O God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
When shall I come and behold the face of God?

2. Psalms 85:10: Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet;
righteousness and peace will kiss each other.
-----------------
Shorter Cur Deus Homo.

1. Revelation 2:17: To him that overcometh I will give a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving him that receiveth it.
----------
The only passage I'm not quoting from the RSV, because the version which first struck me is the version I need in order to make you see what I see here. I found this in CS Lewis's Problem of Pain. It needs the Nietzschean "overcometh" as well as the new name written.

bonus (11): Matthew 5:13: "You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trodden under foot by men."
For itself; but also because I'm slowly working on a thing about zombies.

For every one who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.
--Luke 14:11

IN THE AFTERMATH OF A KIDNAPPING. Via the Christian Persecution blog.

"With these on your feets, every day is the fox hunt, with you as the quarry!"

"COP TALK": I'm at Reason Online, talking about cops who spew e-vitriol.... "Many police departments across the country have experienced similar bulletin board crises over the last few years, putting police officers' freedom of speech in conflict with the public's need to be protected from, well, cops who get off on using Tasers."

MORE OF OTHER PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT AELRED (come to the spiritual-friendship discussion this Sunday!)--this time from the best chapter in the best thing Andrew Sullivan's written, "If Love Were All" from Love Undetectable: Reflections on friendship, sex and survival:

Such a conviction about the essential congruity between virtue and friendship was central to the work of Aelred of Rievaulx. For Aelred, true friendship seems at times a kind of mystical delirium, an essential step toward knowledge of and acquiescence to God's love. For Aelred, "nothing more sacred is
striven for, nothing more useful is sought after, nothing more difficult is discovered, nothing more sweet experienced, and nothing more profitable possessed." Reading him is to be aware of a world where asexual and unromantic friendship nevertheless reaches an intensity that can only be called ecstatic. He describes the union of friendship as a kind of "spiritual kiss"....

It would be easy to see this as a form of erotic sublimation--from a celibate monk at that. But that, I think, would be to condescend to Aelred's spiritual sincerity. For Aelred, the spiritual union is, indeed, like an erotic union in its bliss, but not sexual in the corporeal sense. He expresses the old truth about spiritual ecstasy--that such ecstasy is not a sublimation of sex,
but rather than sex is an intimation of such ecstasy. And such ecstasy, by definition, cannot obliterate the demands of virtue, since it is impossible without it: "For what more sublime can be said of friendship, what more true, what more profitable, than that it ought to, and is proved to, begin in Christ, continue in Christ, and be perfected in Christ?"...

This, of course, is a demanding standard, perhaps too demanding. Most friendships, after all, do not rise to the level of complete virtue. They require a constant capacity for forgiveness and flexibility, and the complicity of friends in each other's faults need not amount to a capitulation to evil. Both Aelred and Cicero concede this at other times. They understand that, even
in the best of friends, there will be many moments of failure, even vice, and although a good friend will not want to encourage a friend in such weakness, he will inevitably tolerate it at times, listen to it, even provide a form of human solidarity with it....

But this leads to a paradox. How can one completely trust another imperfect human being, whose faults are all too obvious and who could therefore betray you at any time?

TWO COMICS LINKS via Journalista: Ooooohhh, gangsterous.

And I'm going to try to make it to this

November 9 (Washington DC): Join Lynda Barry, Alison Bechdel and Chris Ware for a discussion on the graphic novel moderated by Daniel Raeburn, at the Washington DC Jewish Community Center’s Aaron and Cecile Goldman Theater at 16th and Q, beginning at 8PM.

so let me know if you think of anything for me to ask esp. Alison Bechdel!

WATERBOARDING IN AMERICAN HISTORY. Via Balkinization.

PUTTING THE "MORE" IN MEMENTO MORI: November is the month Catholics dedicate to remembrance and prayer for the dead. Daniel Mitsui honors it in his inimitable way--scroll, O man, while your time remains!

TO WHET YOUR APPETITE FOR THIS SUNDAY'S AWESOME AELRED DISCUSSION: New Haven correspondent Helen Rittelmeyer writes:

You know who was nuts about Aelred?

Cardinal Newman.

The best secondary source book I've found in The Great Senior Essay Hunt has been "Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture" by Frederick Roden. (What a title! Available on Googlebooks!) He has a ten page discussion of Aelred & Newman that struck me in two ways.

1. I LOST MY METAPHOR -- CAN I HAVE YOURS? Aelred of Simon: "The rule of the order forbade our speaking, but his countenance spoke to me, his gait spoke, his very silence spoke." Are certain kinds of self-denial also like silence speaking?

2. These two quotes get filed together in my mind: John Dalgairns, talking about Aelred: "The very object of Monasticism is to give a proper outlet to devotional feelings, which are stifled in the world, because it would be fanatical to indulge them; it must therefore be made up to a great extent of
external actions. To throw oneself at the feet of another, and call oneself a miserable sinner, in a convent is part of the rule."

No prizes for guessing which one comes next... "For my part, I think the only difference between them is that if you are a Catholic and have this intensity of belief you join the convent and are heard from no more; whereas if you are a Protestant and have it, there is no convent for you to join and you go about in the world getting into all sorts of trouble and drawing the wrath of people who don't believe anything much at all down on your head." (Flannery O'Connor)

Good luck with your talk!

REMEMBER HOW I SAID THE RAT IS SMARTER THAN YOU?

Guess who passed her generals exam, and is now ABD? *throws confetti*

Go congratulate her!

TWO LINKS: Via Ratty, Gangsters Anonymous (with interesting stuff about "weakness"); and, via E-Pression, Johnny Marr is a visiting music professor at Salford University.

Most nothing is not nothing at all: it is usually a determined nothing, as Hegel says--nothing in relation to something that it is not but that delimits it, fixes its terms, gives it a margin.
--Cigarettes Are Sublime

D.C. AREA PEOPLE: This Sunday, from 3:30 p.m. to 5 p.m., I'llbe leading a discussion at St. Matthew's Cathedral of spiritual friendship--how our friendships with others can be modeled on and strengthen friendship with Christ. The discussion will be based on St. Aelred's book SPIRITUAL FRIENDSHIP, but you do NOT have to have read the book to come and participate!

The discussion is sponsored by Always Our Children, the cathedral's gay & lesbian ministry. St. Matthew's is at 17th and Rhode Island, a short walk from the Dupont Circle metro: http://www.stmatthewscathedral.org/

We'll be in the West Conference Room, in the basement. I will also be making chocolate-covered strawberries (MMM), so let me know if you're definitely coming so that I know about how many to make. If you want to get a head start, this is the handout I'll be using:
http://www.crisismagazine.com/may2006/hildebrand.htm
but again, you don't need to have read anything to come and participate in the discussion.

I hope to see lots of you there! Please email me if you have any questions--and definitely forward this to anyone you think might be interested!

"GRACE IS THE HARDEST PILLOW": I review Kathy Shaidle's poetry collection, Lobotomy Magnificat.

Filling a lack hollows out an even greater lack that demands even more urgently to be filled.
--Cigarettes Are Sublime

ADDICTIVE AND HELPFUL GAME: Rice for vocab sk1llz. It took me 180 grains of rice before I was confronted with a word I genuinely didn't recognize. ("Secern"?? Is that a thing?)

THE RAT IS SMARTER THAN YOU. I recently learned that the working title of Brazil was 1984 1/2--which is hilarious, yes, but focuses on the way the movie is derivative of past dystopias (paleo-futilism?), rather than on the dream that gives the movie its poignance.

Also, if you scroll down, there's a really funny thing about pumpkins.

ZOMBIE VOODOO PIRATES!: So, Tim Powers's On Stranger Tides.

The good: zombie voodoo pirates! Plus lots of action scenes, which aren't my thing really, but Powers does them incredibly well--action-adventure revealing character and possessing pathos.

Two great characters, the puppeteer John Chandagnac and the pirate Phil Davies. And maybe Blackbeard, although he's more a... character-shaped horror, than a character.

As usual, Powers just punishes his characters; you can't have fantasy of salvage without wrecking everything first. I love how he does that.

The bad: There are two women in this novel. One is a shrieking adulteress, and the other is completely passive for 95% of the book. LOL NO. I totally understand why the second character is passive; but it doesn't work, because again: only two women. I know this is a pirate book, thus mostly full of men, but see, that's why you don't make your one major woman basically a pawn or prize.

This is also the first Powers novel where I've ever found him tendentious or moralizing. (On a very related note, this book also includes the only Powers character I thought was just misconceived from start to finish, the utterly OTT Freudian curdle Leo Friend.) If I were to speculate wildly (and apparently here I go!), that might be because Powers thought he was writing a voodoo novel, when in fact he wrote a very Catholic novel about voodoo, and that disjunction between authorial intent and execution might have caused a lack of self-overhearing. I felt the author leaning on me during some of the moralizing passages. Which was totally unnecessary, since Powers can get all his moral effects just through heartbreaking horror scenes, which he writes wonderfully. (On Stranger Tides is almost as much horror novel as action-adventure, I think; Powers crosses genre a lot, and horror is usually the secondary one.)

So... look, it's zombie voodoo pirates! If that makes you want to read it, you probably should. If you're ambivalent, read other stuff by him first--Declare is still the standout among the Powers books I've read, but Last Call is also really, really good, and I think most people would like The Stress of Her Regard much more than I did.

Like writing, smoking belongs to that category of action that falls in between the states of activity and passivity--a somewhat embarrassed, embarrassing condition, unclean, unproductive, a mere gesture.
--Cigarettes Are Sublime

THE MAN-MARY: Some thoughts on a possible feminist reading of the all-male priesthood.

I should begin this discussion by saying I'm not convinced this is the right approach, at all. Its sharp divergence from the usual (and, to me, thoroughly unpersuasive) "in persona Christi" explanations may indicate a fundamental problem in my approach. I am presenting this solely as what someone like me sees when she looks at the priesthood. It is entirely possible that the set of "people like me" is 1; or that I'm wrongheaded from the start!

Still, my New Haven visit made me think hard about the priesthood and women. This is not a question that had ever exercised me. I frankly find it hard to care. I know that sucks and is unhelpful; if you care, I guess all I can do is say that St. Therese of Lisieux also considered that she had a calling to the priesthood, and ended up understanding that calling in a very different and analogical way.

I can also, though, say that I don't know that opening the priesthood to women would be a feminist act. This gets into a lot of tangled questions of "What is feminism?", so let me be totally clear: The following discussion assumes that motherhood is a thing, a real thing in the world, and that no theory should overcome it (though I think we all know, after the 20th century, that theory can overcome all human loyalties).

Assuming that motherhood is a thing--I think it's a thing of being radically available to your children. Maybe radically disposible to them. Certainly radically open to their needs.

And this is precisely what priests are to the faithful. I'm getting this from a thing by Fr. Richard Neuhaus, I think in The Public Square vol. 1, where he defends priestly celibacy by saying that priests are "radically disposible." Like Kleenex. Or... like David's self-as-libation, poured out for God.

I think a feminist Catholic could legitimately say that women are already treated as available, as disposible, even as Kleenex. A woman priest, therefore, would just be a cliche. Of course a chick is here to serve you! That's not radical at all. A male priest is new and different and needed--a radically disposible male, not a female. A man-Mary, whose only word can be, "Fiat voluntas tua."

Again, I don't know that this is the defense I'd make. I welcome all y'all's comments on this (and on my other posts today, of course). But I do think this idea of priestly vocation gets fairly close to what actual priests I've known have said about what their lives are like; and it overturns the standard gender roles in a way that might be instructive, even if this ultimately isn't the best way to think about priests and women and Christ.

THE PASSION OF NEW EVE (Or, I Am the Last of the Famous International Playboys): I also ended up thinking about the story of Eve's creation. We have two creation narratives: God creates all humankind in His image; and God creates male and female. And female comes second. That sucks, right?

Like it did for Jacob and David.

Second children, last children--these are the ones God fixes upon, again and again. Is Eve yet another youngest son? Is His whole point that family placement is overturned, because the humble will be exalted and the exalted humbled?

I think this is likely more valid than the priest=Mary thing I'm about to post, in part because this fits in with Mary as second Eve. All the weight of the Incarnation is placed on Mary--not on Joseph; he's called to accept the fait accompli. Mary's choice has weight, I believe, at least in part because Eve's did. The littlest one's voice can save the world or throw it down. God does this again and again. It's almost as if He were making a point....

HOLD MY HAND A LITTLE LESS: The above posts were all provoked by two things: 1) I'm writing a novel about a transgendered (FTM) Yale student from a Catholic family, and that student's feminist friends; and 2) because of that novel, I went to a discussion at the Yale Women's Center: "I Agree with Eve: Women and God."

(The title is due to some kind of creepy evangelical thing, where people wore t-shirts with some dude's face and the logo, "I Agree with Adam," where Adam is an evangelical dude, so when people ask you about your t-shirt you can, I guess, share the Gospel. Because that will totally work.)

Anyway--I have all kinds of minor observations of the Women's Center (IT IS OKAY TO DISAGREE, OMG--you don't have to act like disagreement is nuclear warfare!)--but the main thing this meeting made clear to me is that feminist analysis can't understand Christianity from within because feminist analysis is power analysis, and Christianity makes power at best a contested and conflicted category. Power isn't what a Christian seeks. So you can say what you want about Christian history; but Christian theology just doesn't lend itself to feminist analysis, because receptivity, docility, servanthood, all of these aren't negative categories for Christians.

"Ardent sweetness" isn't an oxymoron for us.

IN MY OPTIMISTIC MOMENTS, I THINK THIS IS THE MOST INTELLIGENT COMMENT ON POLITICS I'VE HEARD IN MONTHS: "I'm really convinced that the future will be a struggle between anarchy and chaos."

ABJECTION, YOUR HONOR!: Thoughts on two books I skimmed, and one I actually read.

first volume of James Agee's film criticism: I can't remember the title of this. It's... hrm. It's easier to read a lot of Agee at once than to read a lot of James Wood at once, at least for me; but there's still that same sense that he's straining to fit his prose to his persona. I don't know--it's entirely possible that I'm just insufficiently sympathetic to that persona. I mean, Wilde probably does the same thing, it's just that when he does it I don't care. ...And on a lower level, Agee's less enamored of stylization than I am, I think. I suspect he'd deny that, though.

Rargh, why am I approaching this book the wrong way around?? What I should say is that his phrases are so much fun, so often; that when he dispraises something I liked (I can't think of a good example here--maybe Double Indemnity?) he always picks up on real flaws, not made-up ones; that he has a sentimental rigorousness that makes up for his... you know... sentimentality; and that he watches movies through a theological lens, always.

This line, for example, more or less summarizes one big reason I'm a Catholic: "As the audience watches from a hill, with the eyes at once of a helpless outsider, a masked invader, and a still innocent defender, a mere crossroads imparts qualities of pity and terror which, to be sure, it always has, but which it seldom shows us except under tilted circumstances."

Julia Kristeva and Catherine Clement, The Feminine and the Sacred: Why can't these women follow a thought from beginning to end?? A desperately frustrating book. There are some terrific anecdotes ("Louisa of the Nothingness" is alone worth the price of admission), but nothing is ever pursued with ardent need to know the truth. Please do not let your belief that pursuit of wisdom is phallocentric damage your actual ability to hold up your end of an argument!

Oh, and both authors tend to treat race in a way I think you can treat sex, but not race: as if culture, especially racially-linked culture, is a poetic concept, an image available to philosophical and poetic thought, rather than a purely and cruelly culturally-constructed category. And actually, I wonder if this book might be a helpful corrective to people who think sex and race are both purely and cruelly culturally-constructed: Do you really think black women's blackness can be discussed the way all women's womanhood can be discussed?

There's also a creepy discussion of the difference between biological life and "biographical" life, life with meaning, which I think suggests that women can rightly withhold meaning from their biological children. (Which I think becomes a defense of abortion, although that act is certainly never explicitly discussed.)

I really liked Hegel's thing, which I only know about because of Clement, of woman as "the irony of the community."

Richard Klein, Cigarettes Are Sublime. This is the one I read all the way through. You'll be seeing several quotations from it in the days to come. It's Klein's attempt to delineate exactly what he got from smoking cigarettes, possibly in the hope of quitting.

I'm not sure what to say about it. I love its passion for the sublime, over and against the beautiful. I love its brassiness and bitchiness.

It is very scattershot. The chapters--especially the one on Casablanca, and maybe the one on Carmen--tend to waver off into vaporous clouds of association, rather than coherent thoughts. Klein unwittingly makes clear one of the ways his cigarette-sublime differs from the more obvious sublimity of alcohol: Cigarettes are a way to swing out of the ordinary for a moment, have a little ekstasis on the cheap, and then generally swing right back in. Even if The Symposium had been written in the modern age, for example, I can't imagine cigarettes having the same effect on the company that drinking did. Alcohol tends to go places--whether or not they're places you want to go, or should go (Thirteen Steps Lead Down, and all that)--rather than returning you to status quo ante.

Still, Klein's very much worth reading if you're interested in cigarettes, or sublimity, or both. I got a lot out of it. It won't tell you about facing the Big Light; but its little fire is also intriguing.

GAUDI COUNTS TWICE: So I was organizing my art bookshelf the other day (yes, only one shelf, I haven't been doing this whole "visual art! who knew?" thing for very long...), and I realized that all my art books have one of two themes: Spain vs. God, and The Twentieth Century: Could It Have Been Prevented?

I read your book, The Madwoman and the Saint, with Sudhir Kakar, and I like the way you show that one cannot bypass desire by confining it within pathology.
--Julia Kristeva, in Kristeva and Clement, The Feminine and the Sacred

I'm in New Haven. Posting will be light until I return, on Halloween. I should have quite a bit of fun stuff then, though.

Come back, come back to Blogwatch...

Abhay Khosla: The sordid origin of Skippy peanut butter. No, really--a heartbreaking post.

Alias Clio: Something I would not have noticed: "Rather like War and Peace, or Gone With the Wind, it opens with a party. Indeed, as with most 'social novels', much of the book's action takes place at parties--at least, that portion of it which does not happen in staff quarters or on the battlefield."

Church of the Masses: Abp Niederauer on Flannery O'Connor: "...the Christian realist's hope that this time it might be better, but not easily, and not likely for long."

Daniel Mitsui: A glorious foot; and mummies.

For Keats' Sake: Some acute comments on "The Paschal Four" (my take here).

Hit & Run: "In a new report, the Government Accountability Office cites 'thousands of allegations of abuse, some of which involved death,' in 'residential treatment programs' for 'troubled youth.' The report was released yesterday at a House hearing where the parents of Aaron Bacon, a teenager who died at a Utah boot camp in 1994, testified." (more)

Sean Collins: More Bowie sketchbook. Includes glam-rock smoke rings.

KITCHEN ADVENTURES: EHHHH, WHAT'S UP, DOC? Two carrot recipes.

Creamy Carrots and Onion: Chop a couple carrots into coins, and coarsely chop up some yellow onion. Saute the coins, a good heaping dollop of chopped garlic, and whatever dried herbs or spices you're using, all in olive oil. (I think I used dried basil--because I'm trying to get rid of it--and sage, cayenne, and black pepper.) Cook until the carrots are... you know... cooked.

Quickly throw in your onion and saute until barely cooked. (I like very sharp onion; other people might want to add the onion earlier.) Add some heavy cream, stir, and add your favorite chopped melty cheese. I used Parrano. Cook until you want to eat it, then plant your face in the dish.

the verdict: Look, this is ugly. It's basically creamy glop with carrots. But you're aiming straight for the pleasure jugular. I loved this. It was so rich I couldn't finish it, but it reheated perfectly the next day.

Basically, I wouldn't serve this at a dinner party; but I'd definitely cook it on some wintry night when I needed cheesy, creamy comfort.

Roasted carrots and... stuff. Like the recipe above, this is a (significantly) modified version of a Food and Wine dish. I don't know why it really didn't work; F&W has been good to me before.

Anyway, I chopped two big carrots in half crosswise, rolled them in olive oil, spiced them (in approximate order of how much: black pepper, cumin, cayenne, curry powder, cinnamon), and roasted them on a foiled baking tray for ten minutes at 375. Then I split the bigger carrot pieces in half lengthwise, added canned garbanzos, chopped garlic, big chunks of yellow onion (like... eighths?), and more olive oil and spices, stirred everything, and roasted for ten more minutes. Then stirred again, and the carrots still didn't seem quite done, nor did the other stuff seem especially roasted, so I roasted for another ten minutes. Then scooped everything into a dish.

the verdict: Messy (and yes, I could've chopped the carrots and onions smaller after roasting--I would have, if I were attempting to serve this to company, but the dish would still have looked sloppy, I think) and oddly metallic in taste.

These are the same carrots I used for the previous dish, but maybe there is something wrong with them, and I couldn't tell because of all the cream?? Did I manage to over-roast them? They did seem glazy and brown in places, but that's caramelization, right?, which should make them sweeter and roastier, not metallic. Or maybe the flavor combination doesn't work (despite all the spiciness, this dish was bland overall), or... something. The near-total failure of this dish is mysterious to me. I will say that the garbanzos were the only really yummy part of the dish, and since my main goal here was to learn whether F&W is right that canned garbanzos roast well, the magazine was definitely vindicated on that point.

I tried putting parmesan cheese on this after the first several bites. The cheese wasn't awful (it's a bland dish! you can't clash with the flavors in a dish that's already not super flavorful) but it made the dish messier without notably improving the taste.

Sigh.

DANIEL MARTIN DIAZ.

Mysterium Fidei, Latin for "Mystery of Faith," is the new collection of art from Daniel Martin Diaz. In this collection of oil paintings, drawings, and prints, Diaz contemplates human suffering and one's undying faith in the afterlife. His mystical imagery reflects the influences of Byzantine iconography, Retabalos, Ex Votos, the Illuminati, ephemera, alchemy, and 16th-century anatomical engravings.

Check out the "Exorcism" series.

Via Holy Heroes!!

OUR WEIRD LORD: I'm only about 2/3 of the way through the new Dappled Things, but I thought I'd mention my two favorite pieces so far: Matthew Alderman's quick, fun essay + picture "Quid Tum?", and Timothy Barr's poem "The Paschal Four."

The latter is definitely flawed--it won a high school poetry contest, and has the kind of strenuous cleverness you might expect from a HS poetry contest winner. The imagery at points becomes relentlessly clotted, juxtapositions jostling for attention. But you know, I still really liked it, because it gets the weirdness of the Incarnation, the horror-movie elements of Catholicism, without sacrificing (I think) theological acuity. Basically, this guy needs to read the tabloid news for a few years, and then he'll be awesome.

BOO, YOU WHORE!: A review of Mean Girls. Spoilers and possible TMI follow.

The short version is, this is diet no-carbs Cruel Intentions, and although I laughed a lot during the movie, I ended up hating it, I mean really disliking it a lot. Whereas despite my problems with the ending of CI, I basically did OM NOM NOM that movie and all its pomps and all its works.

The longer version: This movie is kind of based on the book Queen Bees and Wannabes, by Rosalind Wiseman. And Wiseman is a DC native, who... hey, taught me self-defense (or attempted to--you'd think "eyes, knees, groin, throat" is easy, but you'd be really, really wrong) and ran a workshop at my high school which is the first (and, until now, only) place I'd talked about being felt up in the darkroom. (I should note that this was after I helped to found the gay/straight alliance at my school, so a) LOL WHUT?? and b) even someone who was kind of a harpy of political correctness really didn't feel okay talking about that incident, which was ultimately silly and minor and had, literally, no effect on my school participation, because I was addicted to photography. So you know, if you're like Katie Roiphe and think the rape statistics must be wrong because nobody you know had that happen to her... maybe you're not the person they tell.)

Anyway, my point is that Wiseman is awesome, and although I haven't read her book yet, this review of Mean Girls should in no way be read as a slam on Wiseman's book. I respect her a lot.

Whose story?: There are some really funny quips about race ("I only date girls of color"; "I'm from Michigan") and gay stuff. I love that they named the dykey girl "Janis Ian"... although, you get three guesses whether she's really gay or not. The first two don't count.

But you know whose story this isn't, ever?

The gay kid. (Check out the prom scene with Janis Ian and her dance if you don't believe me.) The "hostile black hotties" (or "standoffish black hotties"--I can't remember--the black girls who all sat together in the cafeteria). The "cool Asians."

The fat girls.

Yeah, I mean, the demi-demi-dykey, less-awesome Winona Ryder/Ally Sheedy girl reacts like she's been accused of eating babies every time someone even begins to suggest that she might be gay.

This is the story of a girl played by Lindsay Lohan, who has a crush on a guy played by ...a nice white guy I haven't heard of. And that's great, cute white rich straight girls are people too and all that, but... one does get tired of this story. I understand that this kind of Little-Red-turned-wolf story requires a fairly boring character at its center, since she has to be naive and malleable at the start in order to learn her life lesson by the end. But I don't think that excuses the movie from being so desperately predictable in its casting, nor from treating the less cute-white-rich-straight-girls mostly as set dressing. (I think Kevin G, not the gay friend--despite some of his awesome lines--is the exception, since I can't think of an occasion where Kevin gets shoved out of the way so the focus can remain on a more "mainstream" character.) Nor from letting the Lohan character act as self-esteem fairy at the end, princessing that even the fat girl and the wheelchair girl look beautiful tonight, while they beam in needy adoration.

I'm pretty sure this movie thinks it's progressive. Which brings us to our next point.

Whose fault?: So there's totally a scene where the (male) principal and Tina Fey's character hold a consciousness-raising session in the gym, girls only.

What do the boys get? Is high school girls' cruelty--so often centered around dating, "slut" labeling, sexual posturing and sexual fear--solely the girls' issue? I think you might want to talk to the boys in front of whom the girls are posing. And that would still be true even though the movie never touches on the real hard stuff, like date rape.

Now I get why Veronica Mars was supposed to be so groundbreaking....

Girl trouble: There are a lot of fun throwaway moments in this movie--Regina's little sister as an ass-shaking zombie; "That's why her hair is so big! It's full of secrets!" (the movie really is funny)--and you know, I love Amanda "Lilly Kane" Seyfried in anything. And there are right-on cultural criticism moments, like the Playboy Halloween outfits and the "cool mom" shtik. (The moviemakers might not realize that the first five minutes of the flick don't actually make it not an advertisement for homeschooling.)

But yeah: I felt like this was the saccharine version, which made excuses for the real racial, class, and sexual hierarchies it pretended to decry. I hated this a lot, and it made me appreciate the awesomeness of Cruel Intentions even more than I already did.

SOMETHING I LEARNED FROM THIS MONTH'S FOOD AND WINE: There lives a man in this country named Peter Apathy, and he sells hot dogs made of reindeer.

O LITTLE TOWN OF DEATH-LEHEM: Movie reviews, with spoilers for Black Christmas. Or, really, a quickie review and a bit of a rant.

Terror Train: "Featuring Jamie Lee Curtis and David Copperfield." Fo' reals, yo. This is so much fun!!

Look, it's a bog-standard "frat/soror prank gone wrong-->bullied victim wreaks serial-killer havoc" plot. But it's briskly paced. JLC brings, as always, a sense of interiority to an otherwise blank character--you always feel, with Our Jamie, that she's thinking. There are some really nice moments hitting the theme of homosocial friendship gone wrong: We all know frat pranks are a horror movie staple, but it's really good to see a horror movie actually try to figure out why. And the bit parts are individualized, the way they tend to be in older movies (my constant example for this is The Manchurian Candidate)--the scene where the one train guy explains that he's a Free Will Baptist is by itself worth the price of (Netflix) admission.

Black Christmas: This one... I have more to say about.

First of all, it got there first, and respect is due. Its camerawork is intense, scary, the pans and cuts and shakycam coming at the exact right places. And it's more or less impossible to make a bad Christmas-themed horror movie--the pretty lights and spooky carols are right there in front of you!--especially if you have Margot Kidder playing a hard-drinking, kinda slutty sorority girl. She's hilarious and came near to stealing the movie. ...Moreover, there are plot elements where Black Christmas was an innovator, although to say more would be to give it all away.

But you guys know me--I don't always like the first-place finisher. I had two basic problems with this movie, one minor and one major.

The minor is that this '70s flick was trying too hard for an edgy tone. I didn't buy--and didn't want to watch--scenes where the sorority-boyfriend Santa cussed and insulted women in front of little children. I didn't buy that no child would even giggle (am I wrong? I wasn't paying the kind of attention to this movie that I would have given, you know, a Kurosawa flick), let alone tattle or hide. I didn't buy that no sorority girl would get sentimental about innocent ears and step in to protect them. I didn't like that actual child actors were used in a scene that was entirely about the "edginess" of the lame soror/frat people and the edginess-by-transitivity of the filmmakers.

But that really is minor. There were several "edgy" scenes I liked--the drunk house mother, the "It's a new exchange--FE" shtik.

The bigger thing is that I felt like the symbolic elements weren't used for more than set dressing.

Look: This is a horror movie that takes place at Christmas. This is a horror movie, taking place at Christmas, in which an abortion storyline is really important. Why are neither of these elements used symbolically?

Christmas is used aesthetically (spooky carols and colored lights, plus obviously the movie's brilliant title). But I don't otherwise know why the movie takes place then. I mean... no joke, I love spooky carols and colored lights! But what is Christmasy about this movie??

Take Gremlins for a counterexample: Not only do you have Billy's girlfriend's story about her father in the chimney, but you have the themes of consumerism (Japan fear) and greed (Mrs. Deagle)--fellow-feeling vs. Chri$tma$$, family vs. a toy store full of Gremlins. That isn't actually getting at particularly deep issues, but... I totally know why the movie is set at Christmastime. It isn't just for the (amazing) effect of Silent Night, Holy Night wafting over the fire-strewn, devastated town. The aesthetics play into the movie's symbolic language.

Black Christmas not only fails to make Christmas a symbolic element--it also adds abortion, basically the rejection of or contrast to Christmas symbolism (I mean, look, think about this as a writer and not as a political person and you see what I mean), and yet that doesn't become a symbolic element either. Jess's plan to abort her baby is a huge plot element (it's part of why the police suspect Peter), it's a huge characterization element (it shows her admirable determination [and her "good girl" status, I think] and Peter's controlling cruelty), it's an audience element (we get on Jess's side because we see her being humiliated when she has to explain her situation to the cops--and yes, of course this made me sympathetic to her as well, how could it not?)... but it's never a symbolic element.

I don't know why you'd make a movie where such obvious, interesting, supercharged symbols never get to go off. What do you gain by making Christmas a decoration, abortion a macguffin? I have no idea.

Am I wrong?? Did I miss the thing where Black Christmas actually let these two ferocious, opposed elements send up fireworks? I'd love to think so, since Margot Kidder is everybody's good-time girl, and totally makes up for Olivia "She's No Mercutio, I Tell You What" Hussey.

TOWARD AN EXPLANATION, NOT AN EXCUSE, FOR POSTMODERNISM: Humanism: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are [redacted] equal...."

Personalism: "No, no, no. You can't get there that way. Follow me."

As Mickey Kaus might say, if he were me: Too bitchy? Or not bitchy enough?

AS I LIVE AND BREATHE, YOU HAVE KILLED ME: So I did go see David Morrison at Theology on Tap. These are some very scattered impressions, and not at all a round-up of everything he talked about or a responsible review of his talk--more an update of my post about his book (he's working on a new edition) and a set of notes on things that struck me. In chronological order of where these impressions occurred in the talk.

Are you gonna go/to the Sodom and Gomorrah show? First, one of the very few things I hated about Beyond Gay was the "scared straight" sections, in which statistics about AIDS, depression, etc were trotted out in a fatalistic, infuriating way reminiscent of DARE anti-drug propaganda. In his talk at the Four Fields, Morrison seemed to be going down that road as he began to talk about how many friends he had lost to AIDS and how that experience was part of the beginning of his journey to the Church. It seemed, as he spoke, as if he were going to say that he was glad he'd been scared off that path before it was too late--as if there's anything admirable about running away when things get tough.

He really didn't, though. Instead he gave a much more nuanced description of how the close-up with mortality made him begin to question whether his life had meaning. I felt pretty awful for not listening to him more charitably, especially since he'd quite humbly made it clear that he was actually doing a lot of caring for people with AIDS during that time (although I still maintain that the current edition of Beyond Gay comes off badly in this regard, and I hope the revisions change that).

Is that all there is to a fire?: I did find myself thinking a bit about my own first prayers, when Morrison described his. Not counting a childish (hey, I was like eight) demand that God show himself or I wouldn't believe in him, the first time I prayed I'm pretty sure I just said, "Lord, cure my unbelief" (possibly without the "Lord"), on my knees before bed.

Nothin' happened.

Is that all there is?

So, like, St. Paul gets knocked off his daggone horse. David Morrison gets reasonably quick service, with God making His presence known as soon as he began seriously to pray. Me? Not so much.

But I am nothing if not annoyingly persistent. So I did keep praying. Meanwhile, as nothing in particular seemed to be happening in response to these prayers, I kept on with the philosophical stuff that had gotten me on my knees in the first place--clearing away a huge heap of misunderstandings, building the scaffolding I'd need to understand any experience of God I did end up having, basically teaching me the language I'd need to know before I could even grasp that God was talking rather than just, you know, static on the line. And eventually (I seem to recall it took a week or two?? could be wrong--at the time it seemed long, and now seems ridiculously short and easy compared to others' years of seemingly fruitless searching, begging, and interrogating) I did come for the first time to the recognition of the Creator God, the maker or speaker of things in the world, and that was what I needed at the time. The rest of the getting-Catholic stuff followed more or less swiftly from there, and it was a while, I think, before I had intellectual doubts rather than just deep mistrust and the fear of hurting others and myself by entering the Church.

...Uh, this was supposed to be about David, right? SELF-ABSORBED CAT FINDS HERSELF FASCINATING.

Mission bell: After he began to pray and read the Bible, Morrison had to figure out where to park himself, churchwise. He'd had mixed/not-great experiences growing up Southern Baptist, and it sounds like his partner had had worse experiences with evangelical fundamentalism, so those were off the table.

And so he remembered the Episcopalian ministry to people with AIDS, with which he'd worked in the past. So that's where he went.

Unsurprisingly, I was reminded of the recent discussions at Amy Welborn's place, about mission, the ways Catholics can evangelize and the ways we probably shouldn't. Amy tossed off a tart one-liner to the effect that, you know, you could always try the corporal works of mercy.

And I was also reminded of a post somewhere or other, which I now can't find and am probably misremembering, about feeling really frustrated with the ways in which evangelization gets done, or something like that, and wondering if it wouldn't be best if Christians just lived Christian lives and didn't actively seek to witness to others. And because my inner monologue (monologue! monologue! mono--d'oh!) can get very bitchy at times, I'd thought to myself, "Oh yeah, because Christ totally told us to go out and make next-door neighbors of all nations."

(...This post isn't showing me in a very good light, is it??)

And then, I was reminded of the parable of the Good Samaritan, from the week's Gospel readings.

So... yeah, actually. We are called to make neighbors of one another. And, as David's story shows, that call is not separable from our call to make disciples of one another.

You'll notice that I could have reached the same conclusion with a lot fewer steps if I'd remembered the old St. Francis line, "Preach the Gospel unceasingly; with words, if necessary." But I am slow.

I can get it for you wholesale: Dietrich Bonhoeffer's rejection of "cheap grace" was a huge turning point in Morrison's life, specifically w/r/t homosexuality. And while I think that language gets appropriated very quickly and easily, such that "he jests at scars who never felt a wound" and straight people get to tell gay people we're seeking "cheap grace" if we don't accept a fairly deep and humiliating sacrifice, I really did like how Morrison presented the idea in this talk: I felt like he was challenging all of us to look at all of the places in our lives where we were seeking cheap grace.

No kind of love/is better than others: I also really, really liked Morrison's point that there's no perfect analogy for the love and friendship he shared with his partner before he became Catholic. It was eros, but also philia, but also and very deeply storge, and the eros didn't crowd out the other stuff. To reject a couple specific metaphors, I don't think eros is like a deep red dye, indelibly staining the entire fabric of a same-sex love relationship. But I also don't think it's like a red thread in cloth, which you could, with time and effort, unpick from the rest of the fabric. It's just... there, and it has to be sublimated, into care and ardent sweetness and protection and admiration, or whatever complex blend and interplay of loves you speak in your perhaps untranslatable heart.

I have something else I'm thinking about, as well, but my thoughts on that are so desperately unformed that I'm not going to inflict them on you all just yet. Thank Heaven for small mercies, y'all.

PLAGUE MASS: Finally, a post about The Plague, probably the best book I've read this year. This is going to be pretty scattershot.

The first thing I noticed was how suspenseful and well-paced it is. I mean, the plot is right there in the title, so the only surprises can come from pacing and from how Camus works the changes on his novel's situation. In both areas The Plague excels. This might be an artifact of the translation (I was using Stuart Gilbert's--don't know if that's considered good or not), but the descriptive and lyrical passages seemed especially well-placed. This is just a really, really well-constructed novel.

The different aspects of the plague and the quarantine also included some surprises: the theme of lovers' exile, for example. This is so perfect and right. A book as Job-like as The Plague should invoke the deeply Christian metaphor of separated lovers. It's unexpected and poignant and humanist in the best way.

The characterizations are mostly affecting and "real." I had a thing that is partly a problem of characterization and partly a problem of theology/the book's existential stance, and I'm not sure which end is larger. On the basic characterization end, I know Christians say the darnedest things, but while I found it easy to accept that a priest would give the Job's-comforters speech as a sermon, I found it a lot harder to swallow that his sermon would explicitly link Job to Pharaoh. This seemed like pushing things in a way that made it unnecessarily obvious that Fr. Paneloux (like the faithful women in the novel) is being portrayed much more from the "outside" than the other major characters. It made the book seem like it was just avoiding Job, which I think it ultimately isn't, although my theological/existential angle is that I don't think the book fully grapples with a) God's trial and response and b) the fact that it's in the Bible.

I initially thought that the book also ignored or merely gestured at the related problem, of whether this kind of charitable-heroic atheism saws off the branch it sits on. The Plague is a novel set entirely within the clash between happiness and suffering; there's no alternative framework, no sense of (for example) good/evil as a possible different way of understanding the world's obvious self-opposition. Whenever happiness/suffering is the only ethical framework presented, I think of the statue of Comfort erected by the mercy-killers in A Canticle for Leibowitz. It seems obvious to me that if you take suffering as the sole evil and happiness as the sole good you begin to step down the path where the weak are killed because they suffer and they get in the way.

I don't think The Plague goes into that arena at all. But it does draw out other, more nuanced and emotional problems of the happiness/suffering framework--can you call a man to sacrifice his own happiness to do work that will rarely even "fix" things, but merely provide witness and compassion, suffering-with? And I do think The Plague begins to move into the question of whether it's possible to sustain a Christianized anthropology--a sense of what's valuable, heroic, worthy of love and pity rather than contempt, in human lives--without a Christian theology. All this through deeply affecting, memorable portrayals of character and situation, characters full of the unnecessary evasions and corners and histories of real people.

This is the rare novel of ideas where both the novel and the ideas are done right.

CLIFF MAY ASKS:

Can someone tell me what controversial procedures have been used at Guantanamo Bay? As far as I'm aware there is not a shred of hard evidence — and certainly no proof — that torture or even enhanced interrogation methods have been employed there.

more

Air Force Lieutenant General Randall M. Schmidt, appointed to investigate abuses at Guantanamo Bay, said, “For lack of a camera, you could have seen in Guantanamo what was seen at Abu Ghraib.”

more

Detainees at Guantanamo Bay have been left chained in their own urine and feces for a day or more.
more (I think the easiest way to find this is to search for "Guantanamo")

...that's the links I happened to have already on my hard drive, without searching. So, you know, not exhaustive. Probably searching here would also prove informative.

THAT'S WHEEEERE YOU'LL FIIIIIIIIIND ME: Things I'm planning to do this week include:

Tuesday: hearing David Morrison (author of Beyond Gay, or, as I prefer, Extra Double Super Gay) at Theology on Tap--Ireland's Four Fields, Cleveland Park metro, happy hour at 7 pm and speaker at 7.30 pm.

Friday: watching The Mission at St. Matthew's Cathedral, 7 pm in the North Conference Room. St M's is at Dupont Circle metro.

Saturday: hearing the Suspicious Cheese Lords ("a male a cappella ensemble"), also at St. Matthew's, 7.30 pm. Featuring sacred music from the Renaissance. "Admission is free, and voluntary donations at the doors are welcome."

Hope to see some of you all there.

"DISTORTIONS": I have a short story in the current issue of Dappled Things. Find it here! It's sf-ish; very longtime readers may remember it as "What You Can Do for Your Country." In my head, its title will always be "tl;dr"--not because it is, but because that's pretty much what it's about.

THE HARSH TRUTH OF THE CAMERA EYE: Movie reviews. Mostly very short....

Max Headroom: It can't possibly be as awesome as you want it to be, right?

It is awesomer.

Divorce, Italian-Style: I Netflix'd this on reader recommendation after that post I did about Ten Commandments-themed movies. (So yes, you're getting a rough sense of how long it takes a movie to wander to the top of my queue.) The reader noticed that I didn't have any comedies listed, and suggested that this might fit the bill.

At first I was wary--it seemed like the movie might be going for an "aren't wives just awful? so tacky..." shtik; but by the end I found the movie funny and satisfying. There's a great sense of time and place, too--the scenes in which La Dolce Vita comes to the tiny Sicilian town's cinema are fantastic and hilarious.

Chariots of Fire: Also suggested as a Ten Commandments-y movie, "Keep holy the Sabbath" being a major plot point and all. This... hm. It was really well-done (except for the annoying soundtrack-flashbacks in which characters re-articulated the Themes of the Movie, sigh), but really not my thing. I suspect athletic and religious types would get much more out of it.

The "...and then what happened?" final titles were pretty fascinating in that each of the main characters did get a life that the movie suggests they would have considered good.

Videodrome: Literal-minded Cronenberg flick about, like, the television age, and porn. Desperately not my thing despite the presence of Debbie Harry. I will say that I don't think this is as good as Dead Ringers (also not my thing, but legitimately troubling and memorable and unique), because of the literal-mindedness.

(And Dead Ringers had some pretty amazing color control, if I recall correctly.)

Opera: Dario "Suspiria" Argento takes on Verdi's Macbeth!! This was fantastic.

I mean, okay: It doesn't have what philosophers would call "a point." It's a horror flick about bad stuff happening at an opera, and it's Dario Argento, so, you know, a crow eats an eyeball and stuff like that. (Although the "menaced in her panties!" scenes were kept to a refreshing minimum.)

But the music, of course, is amazing; the colors are supersaturated; the camera is all swooning and swizzling and enthralling. It was worth watching some really crap Argento (see below) to get this doomy, glittery showstopper.

The Stendhal Syndrome: Speaking of crap Argento. The idea (hallucinations based on great art + police detective being stalked by the criminal she's hunting) seems perfect for Argento's style, and the opening scene in the Uffizi gallery is great. But the Stendhal-syndrome stuff is fairly minimal, and nothing interesting replaces it. Plus it's very, very, very, very rapey, and... I hated that, I hated having it on my tv set all fetish-like and going on and on. Bah.

Demons: Not actually Argento--he produced, but somebody else directed. Starts out hilarious and fun, and I think if I were more of a gorehound I would have thought it was great popcorn-horror. It's basically '80s music + gore. So, you know, if that sounds good to you... that's what it is.

Trauma: More Argento. Serial killer, electroshock, repressed memories, anorexia. I found it unmemorable (oh snap!) except for the lovely, Evanescence-avant-la-lettre closing credits song.

One fine day
You're gonna watch me for your blog...

Arabist: Saudi religious police attacked by girls....

Church of the Masses: Intriguing line from a post on creating heroic characters--one sign of debilitating sentimentalism in Christian artists: "SENTIMENTALISM IS THE PROBLEM FOR US CHRISTIANS. We want to show that God is basically in charge of the world so everything is really okay. We want to give God the benefit of the doubt."

ComixTalk: Doing unexpected things with word balloons.

OH JULIET. The caption below this picture--not the one superimposed on it--is, like, my new motto.

YOUR FACE IS MARKED UPON THE CLOCKFACE.

WHY HELLO THERE. I will be in New Haven 10/21/07-10/29/07. If you're in that area, and think you can pull together some kind of thing where I speak (about the stuff in my Commonweal piece, I think), drop me an email.... I promise I won't cuss a lot.

PREGNANCY CENTER TRAINING IN DC:

Looking for a unique opportunity to serve your community on Capitol Hill? The Capitol Hill Pregnancy Center is training new volunteers for 6 weeks starting Saturday, Oct. 20 from 9am to noon. If you or a friend feel called to this ministry or would like more information, please call Ann Wink at 202-546-1018 or chpcvol@yahoo.com

This is the center where I volunteer. It's a really great place; if you've been thinking you need some more corporal and spiritual works of mercy in your life, you might consider it.

an article I wrote about CHPC

"Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me."
--Matthew 18:5

SHAKESPEARE TUBE MAP. Via Angevin2.

ALTERNATE HISTORY AND WAR.

The blogwatch is not over yet.
The blogwatch is not over yet.

Uh, I really do have stuff to say, I promise. Sometime this weekend, I'll post about The Plague aka the best book I've read so far this year, and also put up a slew of movie reviews. I may also ramble a bit about Pier Vittorio Tondelli and some other authors. Oh, and there will be another stock-and-soup adventure!

But for tonight, this is all you get. (And next week will be very hectic for me--which will either mean lots of blogging fueled by caffeine and adrenaline, or an acute lack of blogging fueled by ambition, distraction, and fainting in coils.)

Cinecon has moved. Find it here, with a whole passel of reviews from the Toronto International Film Festival.

Jimmy Akin interviews Tim Powers about Three Days to Never. (!) Via Mark Shea. ...Wait wait, Powers has a voodoo novel?? WANT.

Millinerd has been added to the blogroll. This is neither a nerdy hatmaker nor one-thousandth of a nerd, but rather, a blog on matters spiritual, aesthetic, historical, and theological. Not necessarily in that order. Try this thing about "spicy saints" to see if you want more.

Paleo-Future: "Similar notions were apparently the main themes of the Century of Progress International Exposition held in Chicago in 1933. ...Upon entering the Hall of Science, one was confronted by a large sculptural group featuring a life-sized man and woman, their 'hands outstretched as if in fear or ignorance.' Between this couple stood a giant angular robot almost twice their size, bending down, with a metallic arm 'thrown reassuringly around each.' The visitor to the fair need not have searched far for the meaning of this image. It could be found in the Exposition motto: SCIENCE FINDS - INDUSTRY APPLIES - MAN CONFORMS."

The Corner: "But if we overly advantage unchosen obligations (taking as a decisive feature of our place in society, say, not only the fact that we are all born into families but the fact that some are born to the rich and powerful and others not) we run the risk of institutionalizing injustice. So modern liberalism has sought to deny the significance of unchosen obligations, inventing for itself a creation myth by which all human relations result from an original (contractual) choice in some state of nature, which would make only chosen obligations legitimate ones. This has done a lot of good, but it doesn’t change the fact that some of our most important obligations—particularly those in the family—remain unchosen yet binding and essential." (more--really good stuff)

BECKETT FOR BABIES. Stimulate your infant’s intellectual development with Beckett for Babies, an introduction to some of the most important – and most difficult – literature of the twentieth century. Via About Last Night.

I'll be gone
in a blog or watch...

Colby Cosh: "one of history’s most poignant gestures of friendship"

Scans Daily: "With a white lily in my hand, I will kick your arse!" (You know, I seem to recall an incident in the Ellmann biography much like this one, only it took place at Oxford.) Via Journalista.

Sean Collins: David Bowie sketchbook. (Which David Bowie are you?)

Also, does this mean we have to start doing philosophy again??

I'M SURE there was totally a reason for the diaper, here, and it wasn't in any way the result of a desire to degrade and humiliate someone because people thought they could get away with it. Likewise the beating, cursing, and assorted justice. Would've all been fine if they'd gotten the right guy, you know.

(Via The Agitator. And I feel like I should add sarcasm tags, in case this is somebody's first time reading the blog....)

relevant link

"What did you think of Paneloux's sermon, Doctor?"

The question was asked in a quite ordinary, tone, and Rieux answered in the same tone.

"I've seen too much of hospitals to relish any idea of collective punishment. But, as you know, Christians sometimes say that sort of thing without really thinking it. They're better than they seem."
--Albert Camus, The Plague

KITCHEN ADVENTURES: TRAYF! ...Okay, only the actual cheeseburger was trayf, and I'm not going to tell you how to make a cheeseburger. But here are two new things I've made in the past couple days.

A thing to eat with your cheeseburger: Chop up some heirloom tomato* and jalapeno. Saute it in the pan with your burger. (Obviously, this won't work if you have a grill, rather than a studio-apartment kitchenette; in that case, I guess saute the vegs in olive oil rather than yummy yummy beef fat.) Season with black pepper, a dash or two of cinnamon, and some cumin. You can put it on the burger or whatever.

This was really delicious--dark, rich, only a little bit sweet. I don't cook meat very often, but I'll definitely break this out the next time I make cheeseburgers.

* I'm sure you could use regular tomatoes--I only used a big, greeny-red heirloom one because it was on sale--but I think using the spiffier tomato did help the flavor. There was a really neat, unexpected aroma and hint of almost a butternut squash or even pumpkin flavor. Very subtle, and you wouldn't think that would work with the burger, but it completely did. I'm assuming the cinnamon brought out that aspect of the tomato.

Bombay-Style French Toast Sandwich: The idea for the toast comes from the "TWOP Chef" forum at Television w/o Pity; the sandwich thing was just me in a sandwich mood.

Break an egg into a dish, finely dice maybe 1/3 to 1/2 a jalapeno and add it to the egg, add some milk, and season with curry powder (and again, a dash of cinnamon, because I'm slightly obsessed). The TWOP Chef recipe also had onion in the egg mixture, but I left that out because there would be an onion in the sandwich filling. Anyway, mix this stuff up with a fork until it's all mixed together. Soak two slices of bread in the mixture.

Melt a big hunk of butter in a pan. Fry the eggy bread in the butter (and dump the leftover mixture on top), turning as necessary. Top one slice with a thick slice of tomato (I used the same heirloom tomato, but it didn't seem to make any difference in this dish), a slice of sweet onion, and a slice of munster cheese, then put the other bread slice on top. Cookity cookity cookity until cheese is melted. Eat with your hands if no one is watching.

the verdict: This was serviceable. I liked the savory french toastiness of it. I still haven't learned to make french toast as well as my mom does, though; and because the toast was so flavorful and hot, the filling inside tasted kind of bland and didn't add anything to the dish. So while I'll make the Bombay-style french toast again, I don't think I'll do it in sandwich form.

PROPAGANDHI: So, Romero.

The basic thing to know about this movie is that it's Braveheart for people who respect Oscar Romero more than they do William Wallace.

Into which demographic I gratefully leap! No joke--Braveheart for pinko pacifists is twenty times better than Braveheart for Braveheart fans.

...But that doesn't make it a good movie, you know.

I think probably it's impossible to make a movie about Oscar Romero that I would dislike. But oh Lord, this movie came close! There were absolutely beautiful moments: I remember especially the little girl ringing the church bell. Every moment involving the Eucharist (and there were a lot) was amazing, just literally breathtaking.

But it should be said that you could walk away from Romero thinking that a) Communist nations were renowned for freedom of religion (I am not making that up!), b) poor people do better under Communism than under capitalism, and c) Christian movies are propaganda. Romero chose the easy way of "moral complexity" in which the good guys are complex because they doubt themselves, whereas the bad guys are... kitten-kickin' villains who use words like "capital" and "penetrate."

At one point the movie-Romero gave a radio speech in which he transformed the idea of "liberation theology"--he said that what we need to seek, as Christians, is "liberation and redemption." I thought that was amazing, totally powerful, and maybe you all can help me: How does the concept of redemption play out in "liberation theology"? It seemed, in the movie, as if Romero were taking what was real and true in liberation theology, and yet rejecting what was false in it, its attempt to build the Kingdom in this world through Marxist violence. And "redemption theology" seems less likely--to me--to fall into that trap. Do you all have comments?

Rockefeller's not for me--
He's not for the GOP!
He is for the welfare state.
He has had more than one mate.
Rockefeller's not for me--
He would rather feel happy!
--to the tune of "Rock of Ages" or "Smells Like Teen Spirit"

BY THE SHORES OF SANS-SOUCI: A few years ago, I re-read The Tattooed Potato and Other Clues, a kids' book by Ellen Raskin (The Westing Game). TTP&OC was even better than I'd remembered it--funny and poignant, a puzzlebook with a compassionate heart. This past week I revisited another Raskin book, Figgs & Phantoms, which I'd remembered as being the best thing I'd read by her.

It really isn't. I know why I thought so: Figgs & Phantoms picks up on some of my besetting obsessions. It's the story of sullen adolescent Mona, whose beloved uncle is dying; both Mona and her uncle are part of a family with its own religious cult, in which, when a Figg family member dies, he goes not to heaven but to a place called Capri.

I'd actually misremembered the title as All Figgs Go to Capri--and the image, the idea of Capri, is why I remembered the book so fondly. It's an elusive place. Even the Figgs who believe in its existence disagree on how to reach it and what it's like. This idea of the longed-for place that feels somehow achingly familiar, even though you know you've never been there, is entirely compelling to me; and, like the Figgs, I often associate it with the sea, the endless waves against the sand. "Capri" makes me think of the Dante Rossetti poem:

I have been here before
But when or how I cannot tell;
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.

So the idea of Capri, and also Mona's choking, distorting, self-centered grief, were very powerful to me. But Figgs & Phantoms is very uneven in tone--I didn't think it handled the mix of picture-book humor (people with Funny Names and Quirky Habits) and poignance nearly as well as The Tattooed Potato did. The quirkiness felt studied and annoying.

There's also a strong authorial hand pushing everyone toward happiness--"everybody should be happy, and you should let them be happy" seemed like a big theme. This struck me as too easy, especially since in the world Ellen Raskin didn't write, people's happinesses so often conflict. I would rather read about a world in which at least some people, in some situations, do have to accept unhappiness gracefully, and everything doesn't work out perfectly. That's the world of The Tattooed Potato; which I definitely do recommend.

My vision:
It was night. I was lost. Then I saw the tree that grows wild and free welcoming me with open arms.
It whispered a name:
"CAPRI."

FIRST NYTIMES STORY ON 9/11, via About Last Night.

This is not the place to enlarge upon the sensations of a man who feels for the first time a ship move under his feet to his own independent word. In my case they were not unalloyed. I was not wholly alone with my command; for there was that stranger in my cabin.
--Joseph Conrad, "The Secret Sharer"

LE MONDE INTERVIEW W/RENE GIRARD ON ISLAM, CHRISTIANITY, AND 9/11. Ultimately via Godspy.

TIMES OF LONDON: HARDLINE TAKEOVER OF BRITISH MOSQUES. Letters to the editor in response here. I should note that this is something about which I know no more than you can find in this post.

KITCHEN ADVENTURES: "CARROTS AND LEMONS," SAY THE BELLS OF ST. CLEMENT'S. In which I make a stock!

But first, Lemon-Roasted Spicy Carrots. The minor goals of this dish were 1) to cook carrots without peeling them (peeling is my absolute, no-holds-barred least favorite kitchen task), and 2) to use a lemon I bought for reasons which now escape me.

I turned the oven to 375, lined a baking tray with tinfoil, chopped off the greenery and the scrubby little tips of the carrots, and washed them intensely under hot water. Then I sliced the lemon and laid out the slices on the tray. The carrots went on top of the lemon slices, where they were doused with cayenne, cumin, and black pepper. (I wasn't thinking clearly--should've also used some curry powder.) Then they were rubbed with olive oil and the tray went in the oven.

I'm not entirely sure how long I roasted them--maybe 20 minutes, stirring twice? I basically just listened to their sizzling and that bizarre scree noise roasting vegetables sometimes make, and sniffed the air, and occasionally checked up on their color, softness, and taste. When they were done, their skins had shriveled a bit, and taken on a slight and alluring gloss. The lemons were blackened; I lifted the carrots off them with a spatula and put them in a dish.

The verdict: Not the prettiest dish I've ever cooked, but very tasty! A subtle but distinct lemon taste, not obtrusive. I was really happy with this.

And then! I made my first foray into the wild world of STOCK. Just saying the word makes me feel more competent!

Lemon-Carrot Stock. This was ridiculously easy. Just dump all the kitchen flotsam from the dish above (the green carrot tops, the carrot bits and bobs, the lemon peels and blackened lemon slices) into a small pot. Chuck in a few bay leaves. Cover with water, bring to a boil, and then simmer for about 40 minutes. Put a Tupperware knockoff under the colander and pour the stock in; discard whatever the colander catches. You should have a savory, lemony broth. Put it in the fridge overnight, so that tomorrow you can have...

...Carrot & Tomato Soup with Fusilli. This was a tad bit more labor-intensive than I'd expected, but it was also incredibly tasty.

Basically, I roasted carrots for ten minutes using the same technique as before (except with curry powder as well as the other spices this time). Then I set water boiling, stirred the carrots, and put them back in the oven. When the water boiled I put the fusilli in and stirred the carrots again--possibly this is when I decided they were ready? Or maybe I gave them another five or six minutes? Not sure.

Anyway, while the pasta was cooking, I chopped a tomato. Eventually I also chopped the roasted carrots. I sauteed those in a little olive oil briefly, with some more spices, until they were all sizzly-bubbly, and then began to add the stock. Basically, I just added stock until it seemed "about right."

When the pasta was still very firm--like, about two minutes before what I would consider al dente--I drained it, and kept it aside while I futzed with the soup, getting it to bubble and cook. (At this point I also toasted a couple slices of bread; I wanted buttered toast to dip into the soup and soak up the broth. I did that, and it was delicious, but it was also unnecessary--the broth is rich enough to stand on its own, and the pasta gives the dish enough starch. The toast felt like overdoing it.) Once the soup was bubbly, I put the fusilli in, added more stock, and cooked until the pasta was just past al dente.

Then poured out the soup into a bowl, and topped with parmesan cheese. (I used Sargento's parmesan blend, but I don't recommend that--their Mexican cheese blend is fantastic, but the parmesan blend has a blandly processed taste rather than the addictive, focus-group processed awesomeness of the Mexican blend.) The parmesan starts to melt into the soup as you say grace!

The verdict: Totally delectable. A hearty but not overwhelming soup. You could throw some roasted corn in there, maybe cooked potato chunks instead of the pasta; or you could take it in another direction, add a jalapeno and chop up some cilantro on top. ...The lemon taste is very subtle here--I thought I did catch it, but it's very light.

WE ARE ALL IN THE GLITTER, BUT SOME OF US ARE LOOKING AT THE STAIRS.

THE WELL-TEMPERED CAIPIRINHA: I don't know enough about either Bach or Brazilian music to give a good description of it, but Heitor Villa-Lobos's blend of the two is really fantastic. This is the CD I'm listening to, and I can't recommend it highly enough. It looks like Amazon will let you listen to snippets--go! go now!

Your blog is as mean as your watch has been...

About Last Night: Wisdom from... Colette! (RATTUS--click there!)

Mumpsimus: What descriptive passages (can) do in fantasy writing.

Rattus: Post-dominoital tristesse. (If St Therese had written about Domino Rally, rather than about her jam sandwich, would I have considered it profound rather than a bit precious? And if so, what does this say about me, really?)

ROMERO THIS FRIDAY IN D.C.: This Friday, 9/7, Romero will be showing at 7 pm in the North Conference Room of St Matthew's Cathedral (at 17th St and Rhode Island, NW, about two or three blocks from the Dupont Circle metro south exit).

Words fail to express how much I will be there. I have stared for too long at this movie's "release date: Unknown" stamp on my Netflix queue! If you're in DC, you should come too....

"What are all these leaflets headed F.P., with a hammer, pen, and torch, crossed? What does it mean, this F.P.?" Mr. Verloc approached the imposing writing-table.

"The Future of the Proletariat. It's a society," he explained, standing ponderously by the side of the armchair, "not anarchist in principle, but open to all shades of revolutionary opinion."
--Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent

MAURICE BELLIERE IS ME/SAINT TERESA YOU'LL NEVER BE: Recently finished Patrick Ahern's Maurice and Therese: The Story of a Love, reprinting and discussing the correspondence between St Therese of Lisieux and a young seminarian/missionary. (Alternate title for this post, credited to a friend of mine: "This is a toast to St Therese of Lisieux; and for all you pagans, it's also a toast to beautiful women.")

I... don't have a lot to say about this book. Ahern's chewing over the cud of the letters gets tiresome, but it's written with a surprising degree of suspense. I was most struck by the "Diana Vaughan" incident, and the public humiliation and private desolation Therese suffered as a result. And also, of course, by the astonishing good work done by people who often don't know what they're doing, and live in terribly straitened circumstances.

Therese's doubts and fears make me wonder why her namesake's desert of the heart was any kind of news.

Once again, with this book I proved that I am no good at Carmelites. This was recommended as a picture of friendship very different from that presented by St Aelred in Spiritual Friendship; and so I should say that his depiction of friendship feels much more like mine than the depiction in Maurice and Therese. (Although Alice von Hildebrand's--and Augustine's--are closer yet.) I can "get" how to apply Aelred to daily life in a way that I find more difficult with Therese's spirituality. I just don't understand that spirituality; it feels deeply alien (and sometimes twee or sentimental) to me. There are two possible responses to this realization: I could find a different approach that speaks more intelligibly to me, or I could learn more about the Carmelite approach. As usual with Catholics, I think the answer is likely both/and.

ALL THE LAZY DYKES: How is it that Morrissey's 2004 album with the self-parodic song titles is relatively awful (yes, there are lovely bits of "Irish Blood, English Heart," "The First of the Gang to Die," and "I Like You," but really, the guy's incapable of making an entirely horrible album even when he decides to treat each song like a theopolitical Speak-'n'-Spell)... and yet his 2006 album with the self-parodic song titles is amazing?

Seriously, I would love an algorithm for predicting which Moz albums are worth buying. Ringleader of the Tormentors has the only solo Moz song I think might beat anything the Smiths ever did ("You Have Killed Me") and the rest of it is very, very good, swinging and funny and poignant, full of self-overhearing and dance tunes.

Meanwhile Southpaw Grammar is... okay? and You Are the Quarry is just not good. LOL SELF-PITYING. Not even Morrissey--not even Shakespeare!--can get away with a song reprising the... unique Shakespearean passage about "Richard is Richard; that is, I am I."

The two best-ofs I've got, Suedehead and World of Morrissey, are both terrific, though--and Suedehead is the only place I've found "Interlude" (possibly my favorite pop song in the history of ever, a Siouxsie/Morrissey duet) on CD, while World of Morrissey has a cover of "Moon River" and thus wins at life.

But yeah--eschew You Are the Quarry, pursue Ringleader of the Tormentors. You can thank me later.

KISSING TO BE CLEVER:

This year marks the 20th anniversary of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind—and it is the intention of the Manhattan Institution's Center for the American University (CAU) to give Bloom's work the re-examination it deserves.

On October 3rd, we will be hosting a commemorative conference entitled, "The American Mind: Opening or Closing?", in which various scholars will give their views on this subject. However, the future of the American University depends not only on professors, but also on thoughtful undergraduate and graduate students. For this reason, we have established the Bloom Essay Contest to hear student's views. We invite students to submit essays of 1,500 - 2,000 words on Bloom's work and its relevance today. Of the essays submitted, a winner will be selected and awarded a $1000 cash prize.

more (essays due 9/19/07)

Closing is one of the few books I've re-read several times since freshman year. It was genuinely (and very much against my inclination!) amazing.

If you think you know what it's about, but you haven't read it, I can almost guarantee you're wrong; I'd class it with Donna Tartt's Secret History and Maggie Gallagher's Enemies of Eros, not with [stuff] like Tenured Radicals. Over the years it's helped me understand John Paul II's personalism (my post on "the nuptial meaning of the mind" was Bloom-influenced) and obviously influenced my senior essay on eros in Nietzsche.

Ridiculously Bloomian things I wrote in college: "Democracy and Poetry" (a.k.a. All These Useless Semicolons); "Those Are Pearls That Were His Eyes" (eros and education--much much shorter). These are miserably undergraduate in every respect, but I can't help feeling fond of them, and perhaps posting them will increase my humility. The cicada shouldn't be too ashamed of its brown locust-shell, lest it get above itself.

Anyway, I'd be shocked if an essay endorsing my take on Bloom came anywhere near that thousand-dollar prize. I tend to think that Closing, like Reflections on the Revolution in France, is a book both knit to its political moment and valuable primarily for its insights into pre-political matters of aesthetics and love.

But I won't be able to forget that Bloom anecdote I heard first in the New York Times Book Review--"Returning to lecture at Cornell University after 20 years, Allan Bloom tells us, he was faced with a student banner--a bedsheet unfurled that read, 'Great Sex is better than Great Books.' 'Sure,' retorts Bloom, 'but you can't have one without the other.'"

QUESTIONS ABOUT SOUTH KOREAN MISSIONARIES AND THE TALIBAN.

And a blogwatch unemployed
Is nobody's fool...

Alias Clio: Drinkin' styles, by country. (Drinkin' in bars, anyway.) Americans, in this as in so much else, are more like Russians than like Canadians.

Golden Age Comic Book Stories: Amazing, creepy, surreal illustrations for Goethe's Faust. Seriously, these are fantastic. Via Journalista.

Hit & Run: "...But as Maia notes, even people who claim to champion a disease model seem ambivalent about it: Can you think of any other disease for which the most widely accepted treatment involves asking the patient to surrender himself to a 'higher power' and make amends for the wrongs he's done as a result of his illness? ...As with anyone in trouble, the moral evaluation hinges on the specifics of the individual's situation, including disadvantages that are beyond his control and the extent to which he has hurt other people. Drug addiction should be seen as part of the continuum of human behavior, not as a special case in which all-powerful chemicals take control of people and dictate their actions."

Shaenon Garrity: Edward Gorey does "The Trouble with Tribbles." If you know the meaning of that sentence, YOU MUST CLICK HERE NOW. This immense awesomeness brought to you by Journalista.

Indeed, Dylan Thomas himself--not that he was noted for regular jobs--said this; you can't write more than two hours a day and after that what do you do? Probably get into trouble.
--Observer interview with Philip Larkin, 1979