The Fifth Annual Thomas Aquinas College Catholic Writer's Conference, Part 1

A couple of people have asked me how it went...so in case anyone else is curious, here's a little bit about last Saturday's gathering.

Saturday was a typically gorgeous June day in SoCal: sunny, just warm enough to notice the heat. My friend Darin, with whom I was staying in Santa Paula, drove me up to campus. We listened to an NPR report on George A. Romero's Land of the Dead - an entirely silly piece of fluff, but it did make Darin wonder why we didn't bring Romero to campus to talk about the Catholicity of zombie movies...

Movies (and television) have a hold on the conference, its name notwithstanding. Past conferences have featured screenwriters. Our keynote speaker this year was Steve McEveety, producer of, among other things, The Passion of the Christ. (He wasn't taking scripts.) We had a panel on film from a Catholic perspective which included me, Jim Bemis, and Robert Brennan - Brennan writes for the Register, but his career has been in television. (After the film panel came the panel on getting your book published - I was on that one, too - and we must have lost half our audience in the break between sessions.)

The bulk of the conference was held in the library - a semicircle of chairs oriented sideways in the long entrance hall under the magnificent ceiling that was donated to the College back when I was a student. Attendance was good - over 80 this year, an interesting mix of young and old and even a few folks in the middle...

More to come.

Yesterday's Obituaries

Shelby Foote, RIP. "The singing of the bone saws," a frequent refrain in his Civil War trilogy, was poetry. What I most remember of the letters that passed between Percy and Foote was the shared longing to sit in one another's presence - friendship needs a life lived in common, or at least, decently regular visits.

Thoughts on Turning Thirty-Two

(The birthday was yesterday. Ate sushi, saw Batman Begins. Good job, even if the action sequences dragged on. Nice to see the elements they brought in from Batman: Year One. The comic was still a good deal better, especially in its parallel stories of Gordon and Batman, and in its lack of a superbaddie full of talk about purging civilization. Liked Christian Bale. Thought Katie Holmes looked like she was wincing around the mouth every time she got emotional.)

This came to me in the shower: Thirty-two. Even though I feel like an old man - longtime married, house, kids, job, heart condition, etc. - there's still eons of time (provided I get the standard 75 years) in which to fail.

How's that for pessimism? And that's after a lovely, lovely weekend spent with various friends and colleagues... The sky? Falling.

Get Thee to a Bloggery...

...called People of the Book - all about the nightmarish phantasmagoria that is Catholic Book Publishing. Go comment on the "Christian Chick Lit" thread, if you've a mind to. I don't buy into the whole notion of baptizing the genre and making it fit for Christian readers, but I do wonder if there's a market out there - young urban Catholic women interested in reading about women much like themselves... Plus, it seems like an area ripe for comedy. In this chapter, Patience goes to her local Catholic Singles Group. Hilarity ensues. (No, I'm not bagging on CSG's per se...)

Lost and/or Found?

So tonight at Book Soup in LA, Jennifer Saginor will present and sign her memoir, Playground, the story of her childhood spent at the Playboy Mansion. (She was the daughter of a doctor who had his own quarters there.) But here's the interesting part: Book Soup's website gives the full title as Playground: A Childhood Lost and Found Inside the Playboy Mansion. Over at Amazon, the full title reads: Playground: A Childhood Lost Inside the Playboy Mansion.

Why the change? And once you've lost a childhood inside the Playboy Mansion, how on earth are you supposed to find it again?

That's it for me for the week. I'm off to my alma mater, there to make a perfect fool of myself at the fifth annual Thomas Aquinas College Writer's Conference! Toodles!

Hope is a Virtue

There are times, reading about the infinite perfections of God, about the beatitude and endless wonder of His visage, that the hope falters. Can this possibly be true? Isn't it just the fondest wish of the human heart? Anselm's That-Than-Which-Nothing-Greater-Can-Be-Thought?

The Moral Universe

I've got to go yammer on about movies in a few days, movies 1960 to present. I'm thinking about discussing the notion that interesting modern movies often involve the discovery of the moral universe, where the olde-timey ones simply existed within that universe. Thoughts from all you smart folks out there?

Bookmark, Etc.

"But today, with Carus, she'd seen something else. He was nearly as tall and as elegant as Ovid, and she knew the two had roamed the streets together, been gallants at the same parties, rivaled each other in poetry, exchanged sharp criticisms. She had watched Carus striding back and forth across the floor, in and out of the shadows. His sculpted face, his arrogant hands. She'd watched him shrug off something Ovid said, saw him laugh dryly, run a hand through his hair. Yet - though he posed and threw back his head in laughter; though his ambition burned ulcerous right through his cool surface; though, when Ovid looked away, Carus fixed him with a look of hungering envy - all the time, as he recited, dust was falling silently upon him. Soft gray dust, sifting from the sky. It settled upon his cropped dark hair, upon his lashes and the bone of his nose, upon his confident, purple-mantled shoulders. It settled upon his leather boots and clung to his arms and his long, shapely hands; it buried his knees and his thighs, and fixed him there, rising slowly up to his chest. As she stood in the garden, she saw him disappear. Not a word Carus wrote would be remembered."
- from Jane Alison's The Love Artist

Here's the not-quite a propos thing, since Ovid's tragedy is lost and his comedy has survived. Tragedy, to me, is more memorable. But comedy is more valuable. Does it become more dated more quickly; is it more tied up with the ever-changing times? I would say so. But if it is more fleeting, that just makes it more precious.

An Early Summer Morning's Resolution

You thought you were reading a blog. Little did you know you were joining a support group.

Seriously, I'm laying this out in an attempt to increase accountability, even if it's only to myself for having made it public. I have let too much slide, neglected too many things, failed in diligence toward too many things, wasted too much time (and I believe in wasting time). I've got too much to do to continue like this.

So. Resolved. Every morning, prayers from Magnificat, readings from Divine Intimacy. (Yes, my prayer life is among those things that have slid.) Then, on regular workdays, if the spirit moves me, blog. Every day, add one site link and one blog link. Every day, at least an hour on the new project. And every evening, time spent on backed up side stuff - correspondence, reading, other writing...

Let's see how it goes.

Sopranos Season Five

Episode six saw the return of Father Phil, just in time to tell Carmella that her affair was sinful. He's like Bridey in Brideshead Revisited - doctrine without heart. But Father Phil doesn't even get the doctrine right, not all the way. "This man fulfills certain desires..." he begins. "But didn't God give me the desire?" answers Carmella. If that doesn't take you into the mystery of suffering, and that only after an affirmation of humanity's bottomless need to love and be loved, then I think you've missed the boat, pastorally and otherwise.

So this is me, standing by the water cooler, what, about two years after everyone else has had this conversation?

Howdy

I haven't seen it yet, but I've heard tell from them as knows that I'm supposed to be in this week's National Catholic Register. If that piece brought you here, welcome! For EWTN, it was the shoes; for the Reigster, it's the hat - an old favorite. Vanity of vanities..

Finished it.

The treehouse. Anchored one end of an old door to the tree, suspended the other from metal cables attached to a screw eye. Mounted four old metal table legs at the corners for posts and ran chicken wire for a guard rail. Staped the base of the rail to the platform. Primed and painted to hold off the rain - First and Second Sons helped there. Cut and mounted climbing blocks up the trunk, leading up to a gap between two branches - a natural protection against accidentally falling out of the entranceway. This is big for me precisely because it's the sort of thing I'm not good at - "Dad, do you think maybe you could take lessons to be just a little better at being a carpenter?" - and it's something First Son has been asking for for years. Happy Father's Day.

Catholic Author Du Jour

Danielle Bean, author of My Cup of Tea: Musings of a Catholic Mom (check the reviews page of her site), homeschooling mother of seven, and member of the remarkable Augros family. (I knew three of them - Michael, Dave, and Suzanne, at TAC.) Plus, she blogs.

Bookmark

"You are a crow! You watch, and wait, and then fly at me to snatch what you want to use."

- Corinna to Ovid, in Jane Allison's The Love Artist

Yesterdays News, Etc.

I just found out last night that The Sopranos Season Five is finally out on DVD. Pardon me while I disappear from the face of the earth for awhile.

Nice Catholic bit in episode one - Tony telling Carmella "You ain't the only Catholic in this house. I'm old school - I don't believe in separation." That's right - just serial adultery for men. Old school, indeed. And then, the casual assurance that if certain people see Furio, he's a dead man.

Tony is the show's center of gravity, so I can't help but be forever presented with his humanity. As a result, I keep entering into his life, keep sliding towards sympathy for my fellow man. So it's always just a little bit of a shock when he reminds me just how evil he is.

A Writer?

Remember Chris Farley as Matt the Motivational Speaker, talking to surly teen David Spade on SNL?

"What do you want to be when you grow up, son?"

"Actually, I want to be a writer."

"A WRITER!? WELL, LA-DI-FRICKIN'-DA!"

'Nuff said. I've been wandering around some of my old haunts, and talking with an established novelist or two, and it has been a sobering experience.

Speaking of sobering, had to love this one tidbit from BookAngst's surveyed aphorism department:

"The only dependable maxim I know of in publishing is 'Drunks buy books.' Thus, I always set aside some cash in the marketing budget for booze at readings."

Cheers!

First Son...

... oh, what a clever child...

"Matthew, this is your conscience," came the voice through my office window. It was oddly familiar, but not quite the same as my own voice - just like a conscience might sound. In fact, it was almost like my son speaking through a megaphone...

"You need to visit www.justiceleague.com, and you need to let your son sit at the computer! You're not doing it! Do it, do it, do it!"

Such an insistent conscience.

Then it stopped. Suddenly, inexplicably, my son's head appeared at the office window.

"Hey, Dad. I think I heard your conscience."

"It was telling me to do something, son, but I couldn't quite tell what."

"I think it was telling you to go to justiceleague.com, and to let me watch it."

And always let your conscience be your guide...

The Catholic South

These people and their lovely blog are moving to Macon. EWTN is in Birmingham, Alabama. Anybody who reads this blog knows about this fellow, but what about these people? The list goes on. Catholics in the South...who knew?

UPDATE: AC reminded me about Rachel.

Speaking of Nostalgia...

...I am an absolute sucker for this band. Specifically, Umbrella (can't seem to link to the site for that album). Specifically, the song "Every Hour Here." The finest explicitly Christian pop tune I know. The site has a bunch of music samples - check it out, then come back and make fun of me.

Fun with Flannery...

...can be found here.

Meanwhile, here at Godsbody, we're wondering if this brokedown blog needs to be put down...

Episode V

The wife told me to rent it for the boys. I swear. I'm not obsessed. Well, maybe a little. This is the one I saw five times in the theaters - unheard of in those days. Took my bike down to the Cinema with Andy Kozlowski and drank it all in. But my chief thought upon seeing it again was, "Anybody who watches these things in order is going to be forced to conclude that Yoda was driven starkers by his exile on Dagobah. Going nutso over a flashlight? Screaming, 'Mine! Mine! Mine! as he fights with R2 for the thing? Loony."

What's the World Coming To?

...when you see a perfectly good '94 Suburban barreling down the freeway in all its olde-timey V8 SUV glory, and then you pull alongside and hear, blaring from the radio...

Erasure.

ooh, l'amour
broke my heart and now I'm aching for you
ooh, l'amour
what's a boy in love supposed to do?

(I'm terribly sorry. Nostalgia is enormously powerful.) And THEN, this wispy/flabby fellow (moi) turns to you mid-chorus and bellows, "Five kids!" (Not that I'd ever do such a thing.) What's the world coming to?

If I Were A Catholic Publisher...

...I would look for a well-written, dispassionate (as far as possible) memoir from a victim of priestly sexual abuse. Someone in his mid-30s, say, who had suffered abuse while a teenager and had (as far as possible) come through the resultant trauma. I think people would be interested in a first-hand account. More importantly, I think it a story worth telling.

Spider-Man 2

Finally saw it last night, with near-unfettered delight. Pity Raimi slipped back to his Evil Dead-horror roots with that hospital scene, and I could have done without Spidey's giving up his dream only to have it come fabulously true (what is this, the movies?), but still. My favorite shot: Parker, dragging his busted moped along the sidewalk after failing MJ one more time, passing a plywood construction zone wall plastered with a thousand posters of MJ's face. Beautiful rendering of the interior as exterior, and the best part is, it could actually happen. "Everywhere I look, I see her face...literally."

Wild Boys. Better still, Feral Boys.

Just got through with mowing the back - only took about two and a half hours today. I have a seasonal lawn, which means that it's composed of different weeds at different times of the year. The buttercuppy/clovery things are dying back as the dry times set in here in San Diego, and the crabgrass/Asian ornamental is coming on, along with the ubiquitous nasty thing that, if I don't keep it cropped, exudes a milky, sticky stuff from its leaves that turns black and foul and slimy on feet/shoes/etc. But nasty or no, mowing is easier in summer. It can be a four-hour ordeal in the rainy months.

Mowing put me in a grateful mood. I have a big backyard by California standards. Better still, I have a backyard with wilds. Untended parts, out of sight parts, grassless parts. Someday, when the boys are more interested in sports, they'll use the flat, grassy parts more. Now, however, there's an enormous pit under the fruitless mulberry by the upper playground, topped off by a palm-frond teepee. There's an excavation in the lower corner under the pepper tree, the result of countless digs for bugs and worms. I found remains of the trench they dug in the rainy season, one that diverted water from the sluice running alongside our yard and formed an impresssive reservoir/mosquito breeding ground. I found serrated-edge swords fashioned from barbed palm branches. I found sawn branches in the brush pile. Up by my office here in the garage, I found an extra garden put in by Second Son, marked off by branches. (First and Second Sons have patches along the driveway, where the wife buries the compost - cucumbers, green beans, squash, pumpkins, cherry tomatoes, and mammoth sunflowers. The cucumbers are already coming on strong.) A carpet of pillow-soft grass would be nice. But I wouldn't want it wall-to-wall. Wilds are good for boys - and girls, for that matter. Gardens, too.

The wife's garden is going crazy since we finally did a proper cover crop in the winter. The cherry tree is taking off, as are the lemon and lime we put in to accompany the tangerines and oranges, now resting. I've taken a door and mounted it in the Maple tree - one end secured to a branch, the other suspended from metal cable, jutting away from the tree in splendid fashion. First son is delighted - a treehouse at last.

Magnificent Obsessions...

...can be found elsewhere. Here at Godsbody, it's pedestrian, even pathetic obsessions...

Has there been a really good (or even really funny) Freudian treatment of Star Wars? One about the son who doesn't wish to kill his father, but rather, to save him? About the son who is forever echoing his own (dead) mother's last (or near to last, I can't quite remember) words (about Dad): "There is good in him."? About the Father who, in the last act, lays down his life to save his son?

Sadly, we don't get to choose our obsessions. This is what came to me while I was washing dishes tonight.

The South? Steamy.

Well, now, that wasn't so bad, was it?

The pre-show nerves were pretty rough - it was hard to know exactly what we would be talking about - but the main thing was to tell stories, keep the rapport strong, and show off the new shoes. Thanks to anyone who tuned in!

Boxed In

I'm going to Birmingham tomorrow, there to appear on EWTN's Life on the Rock with my father. He's the big dog, so the pressure is perhaps not too insanely great. But still... TV...

"Honey, do I look fat in this skin?"

One thing's for certain - I'm getting some new shoes. It's showtime.

It'll be even quieter than usual here at Godsbody for a while. Bless your hearts.

Postmark

"This job has given me part of the money for your tuition and it comes so hard that I hate to see you spend it on a course like English Prose Since 1800. Anybody that can't read modern English prose by themselves is subnormal - and you know it. The chief fault in your style is its lack of distinction - something which is inclined to grow with the years. You had distinction once - there's some in your diary - and the only way to increase it is to cultivate your own garden. And the only thing that will help you is poetry, which is the most concentrated form of style...

Example: You read Melanctha, which is practically poetry, and sold a New Yorker story - you read ordinary novels and sink back to a Kitty-Foyle-Diary level of average performance. The only sensible course for you to take at this moment is the one on English Poetry - Black to Keats (English 241). I don't care how clever the other professor is, one can't raise a discussion of modern prose to anything above tea-table level. I'll tell you everything she knows about it in three hours and guarantee you that what each of us tells you will be largely wrong, for it will be almost entirely conditioned by our responses to the subject matter. It is a course for Clubwomen who want to continue on from Rebecca and Scarlett O'Hara..."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald to his daugher Frances, July 29, 1940

My friend the poet would be pleased.

Bookmark

"In this silence there was a vast irresponsibility toward every obligation, a deflation of all my values. A passionate belief in order, a disregard of motive or consequences in favor of guess work and prophecy, a feeling that craft and industry would have a place in any world. - one by one, these and other convictions were swept away. I saw that the novel, which at my maturity was the strongest and supplest medium for conveying thought and emotion from one human being to another, was becoming subordinated to a mechanical and communal art that, whether in the hands of Hollywood merchants or Russian idealists, was capable of reflecting only the tritest thought, the most obvious emotion. It was an art in which words were subordinated to images, where personality was worn down to the inevitable low gear of collaboration. As long past as 1930, I had the hunch that the talkies would make even the best selling novelist as archaic as silent pictures. People still read - if only Professor Canby's book of the month - curious children nosed at the slime of Mr. Tiffany Thayer in drugstore libraries - but there was a rankling indignity, that to me had become almost an obsession, in seeing the power of the written word subordinated to another power, a more glittering, grosser power..."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

It is, of course, a debatable claim. But those turns of phrase: the novel, "the strongest, supplest medium," the movie, "a more glittering, grosser power"...

Me and Homer

Homer Simpson, that is...

Cruising around the Catholic blogosphere, I am frequently struck by this excellent line from The Simpsons, when Homer realizes that he has just freed the Babysitter Bandit after Bart captured her:

"Lord help me, I'm just not that bright."

A big part of the problem is that I haven't read enough about the faith I'm so proud of. When I read, it's mainly novels. I've got a few shelves full of Catholic stuff, but it's nothing like my parents, and nowhere near as frequently visited. My friend the carpenter brought some Hubert Von Zeller with him when he visited. The only Von Zeller I've got is Brother Choleric's Cracks in the Cloister. This needs to improve.

But apparently, I'm not alone in my dimness and lack of bookish investigation. Amy has gotten around to opening her guns on the PW piece on Why Catholics Don't Buy Catholic Books. I think it's a good critique, and that there are some good comments following. My only contribution, and it's a weak piece of blame-laying: investigation of the faith is a habit. Reading is a habit. Habits are often best formed in youth. I did little reading as part of my years of Church School prior to Confirmation. I did little real investigation of the faith - and I paid more attention than some. Poor catechesis rears its ugly head.

UPDATE: And what of the Domestic Church, what of the catechesis of the home? Well, that was the source of what little reading I did do - the Lewis, the Chesterton, the various saints. If I don't pick it up a bit, my own children won't even have their father's example.

Family Movie Night

Last night it was Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, which everybody enjoyed immensely, except for first daughter, who got very upset when people started fighting at the barn raising. ("I was trying to get their attention," she told the wife later. "I was saying, 'Keep working, keep working! Build the barn! Don't fight!") First son got upset too - he couldn't stand the idea of the brothers accepting injustices and not retaliating or reporting the crimes. He wept when I mentioned turning the other cheek. But otherwise, great fun.

One outstanding detail: Millie's father left her two books: The Bible and Plutarch's Lives. Plutarch's Lives! In a musical! And the rape of the Sabines is integral to the plot - gets its own song! I love it when popular culture can borrow freely from the loftier realms, when Bugs Bunny can reference opera, when Peanuts can introduce me to a line like, "Man is born to suffer as the sparks fly upward," or "You can't go home again." This was the same sort of thing. The Book Meme that's been going around has been amazing to me - good grief, but people have a lot of books. But if you could have only two, you could do worse than the Bible and Plutarch.

Why Catholics Don't Read...

... is the subject of a recent article in Publisher's Weekly. More accurately, the question is, why don't Catholics buy more religious books. The obvious answer: they're too busy reading religious blogs!

Amy's gonna wrestle with the article over at Open Book, and I'm curious to see what she has to say. My first impression: was it always this way? Wasn't there a time when Catholics read more religious books? I honestly don't know. Any venerables out there who can help me with my history?

The Neo Faithful

Mom, quoting Archbishop Sheen: "Whenever the Church drops something, the culture picks it up."

I thought of that during the brief descent into hell depicted in Constantine - not the blasted LA wasteland hell, but the Bosch-style hell below that, full of the writhing damned and the fallen angels. Of course, the camera couldn't linger too long - it's too awful an image, and more awful still without a Christ to oppose it (Jesus didn't get big play in Constantine). Just long enough lend weight to girl's distress after she gets her own glimpse: "All those people..."

And of course, Constantine had Keanu, and Keanu was Neo in The Matrix, and no end of comment was made about the similarity of his outfit to that of a Jesuit cassock. You don't see too many of those cassocks these days - why not? Don't people in the Church understand what the makers of The Matrix understand? Those robes are baaaaaad. Whenever the Church drops something...

And that made me wonder if anybody had ever Photoshopped a Roman collar onto a shot of Neo in his robes. It's the sort of thing that no doubt would have turned up on Father Silbey's Saintly Salmagundi, before Father left the blogosphere.

And yes, I am once again picking over ancient corpses. Yesterday's news today, etc.

It's All About Meme

Amy's gone and tagged me with this books meme that's been floating around. Books - how quaint and charming! As if anyone had time to read books in the age of the Interweb! Um, kidding, sort of.

Total Number of Books I Own: Being a semi-literate young punk, I'm nowhere near the numbers that other people have been putting up. Maybe 300? (I didn't go to the shelves and count.)

Last Book I Bought: A bunch at Wahrenbrock's Book House in downtown San Diego, including four volumes of Ogden Nash, Brooks and Warren's Understanding Poetry, Nothing But Wodehouse (an anthology edited by Ogden Nash), and The Love Artist (can you tell I had a poet visiting?)

Last Book I Read: All the way through? Beginning to End? Fat Girl, a memoir by my editor at the Reader, Judith Moore. Amazing to see the degree of love in the love/hate relationship with food - the hate (or at least sadness) here, the love in Never Eat Your Heart Out.

Books That I'm Reading Now: It's been a bit of a dry spell. Let's say Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara, and maybe that'll make me get past the first three (delightful) pages.

Books That Have Been Important To Me: The Library of America's Collected Works of Flannery O'Connor, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Great Brain series by John D. Fitzgerald (in my happy youth), Love in the Ruins by Walker Percy, Madame Bovary, Ironweed by William Kennedy, The Portrait of a Lady, most of Waugh, and yes, The Bible (RSV). That's off the top of my head. I have a lousy memory.

Tagged: Another Coward.

UPDATE: The wife says it's more like 1,000 books, no doubt because she's the one who sees the credit card statements. And kudos to the folks who thought to include cookbooks - Patricia Well's Bistro Cooking was huge for me, as was Baking with Julia. I should have included Chesterton's life of St. Francis, and Athanasius' On the Incarnation. And what about my huge crush on Thurber and Joseph Mitchell when I was just graduating from college? And what about Fitzgerald's short stories, and The Sun Also Rises? What about Garrison Keillor, who makes me laugh? Kermit Lynch's Adventures on the Wine Route? J.F. Powers' Morte D'Urban? Lewis' Screwtape Letters and The Weight of Glory? Sigh...

Jet Lagged

Okay, we're back in chilly, cloudy, Southern California, bracing for the return to work and the attempt to figure out what I meant by "transgressive" in the previous post (thanks for your comments). I know it wasn't necessarily about mores - it was about the inner goings-on of the artist, pushing past something interior. Gad, this sounds silly.

The Trickster God

I've been here in Upstate New York for three days now, and we've had three straight days of sun. Plenty of fluffy, cottony clouds, but still - sun, sun, sun. My poor wife just doesn't believe all my talk about the Cloud Belt, about overcast being a state of mind reflecting the state of nature. It's just like California! The poor thing. If we ever moved back here, she'd be shocked, shocked to find the truth...
Heading back West tomorrow. We'll see what comes.
Meanwhile, I'm wondering if artists have to be transgressive - at least nowadays. Comments welcome.