New Game: Who's Sunk Lower?

Jeremy Irons in Dungeons & Dragons or Ben Kingsley in Bloodrayne?

What is it about Oscar-winning Englishmen and the lure of playing evil tyrants in wretched fantasy movies?

Department of Squeaky Wheels

Reader Adam passes this along in response to my Folk post. Do click the "Listen Now" button at left.

What is it about the Midwest? I haven't dug too deeply yet, but the first impression is that this is a measured, non-hysterical, even thoughtful attempt to actually do some good.

Yeah, you've seen it already...

...and yeah, you've heard the argument before, and yeah, it's just too darn smooth, but gosh all, the good people at JibJab have a good time with Big Box Mart.

Something in the air...

...maybe it's that document. I don't have much to offer, but this morning, I did just happen to put on the one shirt I own from International Male, and I thought a few words of explanation might be in order.

I started receiving the International Male catalog when I was around 14, living at home in a small city in upstate New York. I do not know quite why I started receiving it - I was usually a Land's End/J.Crew kind of catalog shopper, and then only rarely (i.e., back to school clothes shopping with Mom). But I leafed through it as I would any other self-conscious 14-year-old, hoping to find cool clothes to cover a deep-seated (ahem, document, ahem) lack of cool. I did think the banana hammocks a little odd, but I was something of a naif, and didn't give it much thought.

I did, however, find a pair of jeans (Code Bleu!) and a button down shirt that I really liked. When I called to order, the gentleman on the other end of the line must have been surprised by the youthful timbre of my voice. "How old are you?" he asked.

"Fourteen."

"Well, if you ever want to talk, just call me, anytime." I think he said his name was Steven.

Now, I'm not about to ascribe predatory motives to Steven. I think he probably thought he had a young homosexual on the line, possibly a young homosexual who was confused and frightened. He probably wanted to help me. At the time, I just thought it was really, really weird for this sales dude to be letting me know that I could call him if I wanted to talk.

The jeans wore out - I got holes in the knees (having fun yet, Matthew?) But the shirt, which I purchased some 18 years ago, is still with me - the cotton is somehow both fabulously tough and fabulously soft.

Dear New York Times...

...we are so sorry. Just two posts ago, we called you mean. What's worse, we called you dull-witted. We take it all back. As fine a send-up of media hand-wringing over its recent failures, combined with a sly self-laceration over the fixation on gossip (guilty as charged) in times of crisis, as we've read. And so dry!

(Link via The Transom.)

"You have to look at U2 as a multimillion-dollar, multinational media company..."

Given Rocco's devotion to both The New York Times and U2, we here at Godsbody can't help but wonder why he hasn't posted about this. He must be distracted by that document that's getting talked about in some circles these days.

(Last link via Amy.)

Score One for Dale Peck...

Dear New York Times Book Review (click on Multimedia),

If you're going to be mean, it helps to be witty about it. Or stylish, or clever, or funny, or whatever, just something besides just blunt-instrument mean. Even people who hate Dale Peck must be cringing with embarrassment over this.

Ain't In It For the Money

Teachout has a sobering number to share with the would-be Catholic novelist...

Ogden Nashing of Teeth...

There is little that can top, for quickness,

The dramatic reordering of priorities and general emancipation from worries about the mortgage or your childrens' future brought on by an acute bout of intenstinal sickness.

Put another way, when you're hunched over a midnight toilet,

It doesn't matter too much whether the addition of another stanza will serve to perfect the poem you're working on, or, more likely, to spoil it.

December Approaches...

...which means my oranges are finally getting ripe. Life could be worse.

T-Shirt of the Day...

...courtesy of glarkware. Of course, they are doing their whole post-modern sarcasm job on the notion, but that's where the loony Catholic can trump them with his own brand of post-post-modern literalism and sincerity! On the other hand, if the good people at glarkware had any idea of the glories of NFP, they would see the silliness of this sentiment. For virgins? That's only the beginning...

Folk

Attended Mass yesterday (Thanksgiving) at the chapel of the Little Flower Haven, a Carmelite convent/convalescent home. The chapel is a box, nothing too great, nothing too awful. The old chapel is now Little Flower Hall. There's a picture in the hallway of what it used to look like. It was gorgeous. Sigh.

Smallish chapel + very enthusiastic guitar group up in the loft = the temptation to actually put my fingers in my ears so that I could pray after Communion. As they busted out

We have come to share our story
We have come to break the bread
We have come to know our rising from the dead

...the same song, incidentally, that we droned again and again when our parish made a magnificent Eucharistic Procession through Little Italy (they had some classic Eucharistic hymns on the song sheet, but the people with the guitars kept repeating that one)...

anyway, as they busted that one out, I thought, "Maybe I was wrong. I always used to complain that this stuff was faux-folk, crafted in some Frankenstein hymnlab. But it's been a generation now, and it's what keeps getting sung. It's what I heard when I grew up. It's what my kids are hearing as they grow up. Maybe, whatever its origins, it's becoming the true folk music of the American Catholic Church. There's certainly nothing competing with it, nothing offering an alternative musical aesthetic. Sigh."

"Thank God for the gift of music," said my wife as we left Mass. She's a sharp one.

Cashing In

Reese Witherspoon is our generation's Holly Hunter.

Go watch Raising Arizona again. Then The Incredibles. Then go see Walk the Line.

Oodles of Cash

Pity a generation that discovered the world first through satires and riffs...

There's a great old Peanuts where Lucy comes up to Linus while he's watching Citizen Kane on TV. [CLASSIC FILM SPOILER ALERT!] "Rosebud was his sled," she says, and walks away. Linus, naturally, screams in anguish - she's ruined it for him! A great example of casual sibling cruelty, a hilarious strip. But in the process, ol' Charles Schulz ruined Citizen Kane for me, too. I was maybe eight when I read the strip, had no idea what Citizen Kane was. Only later, when I saw the film for the first time, did that Peanuts come back to me, laughing, mocking...

Similarly, my first exposure to Johnny Cash came through a record of Richard Nixon satire. It was a great album, and at one point, Nixon actually ends up in prison for his role in the Watergate break in (he's caught because he left a jowl print on the wall as he fled the hotel).

He goes to Folsom prison, natch, and of course, he gives a concert for the inmates.

"Hi," he intones to the crowd, "I'm Richard Nixon." I had no idea at the time that this was a riff on "Hi, I'm Johnny Cash." Then he launched into his own version of Folsom Prison Blues - one verse ran like this:

When I was a young boy
My momma told me, "Dick,
Always be a good boy
Don't mess with politics
But I'm stuck in Folsom prison
Why was this my fate?
You can take this here guitar
And shove it up your Watergate!

Peeling back the layers, understanding the world backwards.

More Cash

[SPOILER?]
I read some critical reviews of Walk The Line which complained that Walk The Line didn't give us the Cash who was at once a calculating poseur and a genuinely sincere soul. I'd say proposing to a woman, herself a performer used to pleasing audiences for a living, during a performance, in an effort to get her over whatever's been keeping her from saying yes for years and years, is pretty darn calculating. But since he really did love the woman, it's also genuinely sincere.

Cash v. Ray

I'm sure everybody here remembers the classic Barenaked Ladies tune "Be My Yoko Ono," which includes these lyrics:

I know that when I say this
I may be stepping on pins and needles.
But I don’t like all these people
Slagging her for breaking up the beatles.
(don’t blame it on yokey!)
If I was John and you were Yoko,
I would gladly give up musical genius,
Just to have you as my very own, personal Venus.

So I think maybe this is why my wife's first question upon leaving Walk the Line was, "Why did I like that better than Ray?" It's true that Ray was a better exploration of musical genius and development, but that was also maybe part of its coldness - Charles was presented as a man who would sacrifice anything and anyone to his music. It's harder to stay with such a character on a human level. Walk the Line may have neglected Cash's musical development, but maybe that's at least in part because he had this nagging personal connection that haunted him, that wouldn't allow him to be a slave to his art. Why, it's almost like being Christ-haunted...

Coughed Up II...

Unwise name for French bakery in the States:

Life is pain

Coughed Up...

...from the back of the brainpan...

Good title for a short story: Unsaid Prayers.

Elsewhere Re-Revisited

Terry Teachout and movie reviews have gone their separate ways:

"I find myself less interested in writing about film, not because my love for the medium has diminished but because American filmmakers are now making so few movies worth seeing. These things happen in the arts—ballet and modern dance have also been going through a similarly bad patch—and rather than continue to rail against the self-evident each month, I’ve decided to till greener pastures."

By way of a parting gift, he lists his favorite 15 films since he started his gig in '98. He is clearly brilliant, since his tastes align so closely with my own. I might quibble over Lost in Translation and Out of Sight and the third act of High Fidelity; I was left a little chilled by Ghost World and Next Stop Wonderland even as I admired them, and I confess to missing The Station Agent, You Can Count On Me, and Panic (pace, Mark!). But as for the rest...

What say you all? Check his list and fire up the slings and arrows...

Elsewhere Revisited

Thomas Aquinas College blogmeister Matthew Peterson gets all heteronormative on your bad self - with a special nod to high-end (Harvard, BU, Vassar) student porn.

Elsewhere

My heart is barely in things just now, as the personal/professional life has moved from a rapid boil to simply rapids.

But Clayton gets a taste of our Mickey Mouse religion over at The Weight of Glory.

From My Dad

Friends,

U.S. citizens have been extraordinarily generous in responding to the needs of the victims of Hurricane Katrina. But even more desperate is the continuing plight of the victims of the October 8 earthquake that struck parts of northern Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan.

The quake affected about 4 million persons, nearly half of them children. It destroyed most hospitals, schools, government buildings, roads, and bridges serving countless small villages at the foot of the Himalayan mountains.

More than 900 aftershocks caused landslides, making the worst-hit valleys accessible only by mule. Thousands of victims have still not been reached. Pope Benedict recently urged an expansion of the international relief effort.

The United Nations asked the developed nations for $550 million for relief, but so far only $131 million has been pledged. By comparison, $13.5 billion was pledged to the victims of Asia’s December 26 tsunami.

The harsh mountain winter has begun to arrive, with plunging temperatures predicted for next week. If more help does not arrive very soon, according to the chief of the United Nations relief effort, “tens of thousands are at risk of death.”

Winterized tents are immediately needed for those without shelter. Relief organizations helping in the region accept donations online (see, for example, Catholic Relief Services). By the end of October, only about one-fourth of the homeless had received tents.

As most of us prepare to enjoy the abundant blessings of Thanksgiving, lives hang in the balance in the mountains of Pakistan.

Tom Lickona

Elsewhere

Things are moving from simmer toward rapid boil in the parts of my life that actually pay - which is to say, I have to pay a little mroe attention to the day job these days. More as it develops.

But let me suggest this: if you havent' toured the Gallery of Regrettable Food, you need to do so. I laughed until I cried. The Meat and Jello sections are my favorites. This, this is what the Interweb is meant for.

Thanks...

...to the nice young man who carded me today at Trader Joe's. I'm 32, and my face looks, to quote George C. Scott, like a relief map of Afghanistan - but the youngster was decent enough to pretend I looked young enough to card. It's these small kindnesses that see you through sometimes.

Cool Comix

A Lesson Is Learned But the Damage is Irreversible.

Abstruse? Yeah. But amazing. (And occasionally bawdy.)

Arrested Arrested Development

I know the ratings have been low, but what about DVD sales? Isn't TV just an ad for the DVD now, anyway? Scroll down to Best Value and get both seasons for just over thirty bucks. Thanks to T-Muffle for the heads-up.

I haven't seen season two yet - this is Godsbody, after all - but I will never forget the pilot. The closest thing to modern screwball I've ever seen. RIP.

Good Times

One good Times story (about Nichole Richie) deserves another (about the embarrassing things brokers encounter when showing NYC real estate). I'm trying to decide which is my favorite line. Two possibilities:

"Bad kitchens, bad bathrooms, horrible pictures of ugly families - all of that doesn't matter as long as the price is right."

And:

Mr. Sukenik suggested that for some reason people with higher incomes tend to be more oblivious to privacy issues, a fact reflected not only in their behavior when they sell their apartments, but in their heedlessness to what the neighbors see.

The brutal aesthetics of ugly family photos vs. the insulating (numbing?) power of money - tough call.

Brokeback Mountain

Interesting bit from this Newsweek story on the film about the cowboys who fall in love:

In an early meeting, Schamus told Lee that, from a marketing standpoint, they were making this film for one core audience. "Yes, of course," Lee said. "The gay audience." No, Schamus said. "Women."

When it came time to design the poster for the film, Schamus didn't research posters of famous Westerns for ideas. He looked at the posters of the 50 most romantic movies ever made. "If you look at our poster," he says, "you can see traces of our inspiration, 'Titanic'."

UPDATE: Choire Sicha writes about the film in today's New York Observer:

"And so, like Titanic, doesn’t Brokeback Mountain have more to do with the ever-strengthening audience of women? This isn’t really about gay sex at all in some ways: It’s emotional porn, an array of hot, spread-eagled men with feelings. You could make the oh-so-late-90’s case that our gay cowboys are just women being battered by the mean man of Homophobic Society. In any case, it’s men being victimized by society for being gay (or, at least, for being in love with a man), which superimposes an erotics of powerlessness on the chiseled rodeo riders. It’s the horse opera become pomo soap opera."

Everybody Go Read...

...this interview with Barbara Nicolosi over at Godspy. Godsbody - pointing you to good stuff elsewhere since 2005.

BookWatch

This article from the New York Times is linked to without comment, just an amazed half-smile.

Hello...

....now this is interesting. Garry Wills arguing for the relevance of the rosary.

Got old, gone simple...

viz this, from the archive of the graying (by his own account) Terry Teachout (written when he was a younger man than he is today):

But as I grow older, I find myself increasingly suspicious of the long-term viability of self-consciously "difficult" art. This is part of what I meant when I observed a little earlier today that the first responsibility of art is to give pleasure. Of course it is our reciprocal responsibility to be open to the new. What seems strange now may soon come to seem beautiful—but I very much doubt that a lifetime’s puzzling over Finnegans Wake will cause it to seem anything other than pointlessly complex. There’s a reason why the greatest artists dissolve into simplicity as they grow older.…

Follow the link to see the whole piece.

Jukebox

I gave the wife all kinds of guff about her devotion to Counting Crows' August and Everything After - this was back in college, mind you, before she was the wife. For some reason, it irritated me to no end. She ignored my abuse - "Oh, Matthew - you're more than a little misunderstood," she said, quoting one of their songs - I think it was "'Round Here."
After we married, I felt guilty (natch) about all my attacks. To make up, I bought the wife the band's second album. Naturally, she didn't care for it. Instead, it's me who has ended up remembering "A Long December" every time the California weather starts to cool.

Drove up to Hillside Manor
Sometime after two a.m.
And talked a little while about the year.
I guess the winter makes you laugh a little slower
Makes you talk a little lower
About the things you could not show her

And it's been a
Long December
And there's reason to believe
Maybe this year will be better than the last...

Poetry War

The poet August Kleinzahler wrote a CD Review column for the San Diego Reader for a couple of years - mostly jazz and classical. I thought he was a music buff. Turns out he was (is) a poet, too. Then, while visiting my friend the poet in Wisconsin, I got to read his slings-and-arrows assault on Garrison Keillor in Poetry magazine. It made for some good talk; I saw Kleinzahler's point, but I like Keillor, so I was in the mood for a defense. David Orr recalls the fracas in a review of Keillor's latest anthology. Brilliant bit:

The most obvious problem with "Good Poems for Hard Times" is that it proposes that "the meaning of poetry is to give courage." That is not the meaning of poetry; that is the meaning of Scotch. The meaning of poetry is poetry.

But the whole thing is a good read.

Sayings

While wrestling with the children tonight - their favorite Daddy-related activity - I had occasion to recall, albeit in a rather literal fashion - an old saying of my wife's:

I thought you were on my side, but now I find you're on my back.

I've always liked that one.

Thank you...

...to everyone who's offered support. I'm removing Mark's post and my response, because there are indeed two sides to the story, and I don't want Loyola's position to be misrepresented, and I don't want to has out all the details here. This has been a very bumpy few days. Apologies to everyone whose comments were deleted.

Nope.

Loyola Press will not be publishing book two in its current form. Not sure if another form is possible. I do not want to say anything against them - they had good reasons for rejecting it. Off now to pray about it.

Beards

So I'm looking at this and it makes me think that Clooney's mug needs to be added this this.

Domesticity

I never thought I'd see the day when I hailed Brian De Palma as a champion of subtlety - maybe it was David Mamet's script. But I've been thinking of domesticity - particularly, as regards the decoration of the home - and its use in DePalma's The Untouchables versus its use in Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation. And while Lost in Translation has all the understated indie cred, I think The Untouchables puts the contrast of mundane, everyday goods and The Crisis of the Moment to better use.

Lost in Translation: Remember when Bill Murray, miserable guy stuck in Japan and falling in love with Scarlett Johannsen, gets the call from his wife about the swatches? She's replacing the carpet or some such, and wants his opinion. Murray, of course, could not possibly care less - and the film makes it clear that we shouldn't, either. "He's barely hanging on, and all she can think about is swatches. What a shallow materialist."

The Untouchables: Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) is going up against Al Capone in a fight that threatens to spill much blood and make a monster out of our hero. ("I have become what I beheld..." - absolutely chilling.) Ness gets a call from his wife - she's redecorating the kitchen or some such, and is telling him about the curtains. After he gets off the phone, he marvels to his partner that there are still places in the world where people care about curtains. But there's no contempt in his voice. Rather, he recognizes that he's the one in the strange situation, he's the one who has left the ordinary goods of hearth and home behind. Yeah, getting Capone is the most important thing right now, but it's not what life's about. Life is about mundane goods, everyday beauty, family...and yes, curtains.

Ness knows that. Murray doesn't. It makes you wonder - was that shallow materialist wife always that way? Or did she turn to stuff when her husband drifted away? We like Murray, because he's the one we're dealing with. The wife is little more than a voice on the phone. But that doesn't mean he's in the right.

The Bad Catholic's Guide to Good Living...

...is a title delightfully similar to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe...

The good reviews for Zmirak's book are starting to spread across the blogosphere.

Cheek

If you must pester your editors, for heaven's sake, try to do it with some style. Thank God they are good natured fellows. This is what I just sent them:

I know, I know, I know,
There must be meetings and discussions,
Diagrams of repercussions
Drawn on charts that ebb and flow.

Someone must assess the cost
Of publishing this kind of thing
(The bottom line, a cold-eyed king)
What might be gained, what might be lost.

All this and more is understood
A writer can but sit and wait
To hear his latest effort's fate
But tell me this - is the writing good?

The stories, which offer you a glance
Inside this Catholic soul of mine
Bound with bits of grace and twine
Do they drive your eyes askance?

Or do you think it might be good
To thus assail the pious saints
To strip the portraits of their paints
The plaster cracked, the splintered wood?

Yet Another Voice...

...testifying to what divorce does to kids. (Note that now-back-pedaling grand-boomer Judith Wallerstein has, in writing the foreword, given the imprimatur to GenXer Ms. Marquardt's book.) Predictably, yet another defensive response to this witness has arisen--but this response is more obtuse than most. Here Jack Shafer, editor-at-large for Slate, "flips" the data in question in order to "deconstruct" what should be the common-sense conclusion that divorce adversely affects kids--even as the decidedly non-common-sensical implication of his "data-inversion" is that 96% of children from intact families felt like strangers in their own homes, while 99% of children from intact families felt like they didn't have a home at all.

Actually, we can see in the last full paragraph that Shafer is indeed capable of doing the math, and he does, up to a point--the point where it stops being something he can use and starts being something that makes him look silly.

Denial ain't just a non-acceptance of reality. It's also a switching-off of the brain.

Travelin'

I read this today, from a young woman who had spent the better part of three years traveling the world:

"You can't really learn anything about the world by staying in your own neighborhood."

Let me say first that of all the things I didn't do before getting a job and getting married and starting a family, I miss traveling the most. Or rather, I wish I could miss it. I had my pilgrimage to Yugoslavia and Rome during Senior year of high school, and since then...does Ensenada count? (Actually, yes, I think it does.)

Second, let me affirm what is true in what she says - it is always good to remember that the world is a very big place, full of people very different from oneself in many ways.

But at the end of the day, I think she's mistaken. Your own neighborhood is a world unto itself. Your own family is a world unto itself. And you can learn an awful lot about the world from what's close at hand, if you pay attention.

Catholic Fiction Re-Redux

Letter from Flannery O'Connor to John Lynch:

"...I am not sure that the business of the Catholic writer is to reflect anything but what he sees the most of; but the subject of what is and what is not a Catholic novel is one I give a wide berth to. Ultimately, you write what you can, what God gives you."

Amen. So if what you see the most of, what God gives you, happens to include Catholics - then in they go. You don't put them in becuase you think they're needed, or they'd be helpful to the plot, or to make a point. You put them in because you know them.

Oh, and this other tidbit:

"I feel that if I were not Catholic, I would have no reason to write, no reason to see, no reason ever to feel horrified or even to enjoy anything."

Forum

Way back when, regular poster Another Coward was kind enough to set up a Forum for this site - a bulletin board, wherein folks could propose a propos topics, start up conversations, build a community of ideas, etc. etc.

I was trying desperately to make a second book at the time, so I didn't give the thing my proper attention. Now that I give it a closer look, I find that it's really just ducky, and it could be a really good thing, I think. (Way back when again, there was talk of digging into and doping out the life of NFP - the Forum might be a good place for that...)

It will come as no surprise to anyone when I say that I'm not real smart-like when it comes to the Interweb (Moderator?), but I'll do my best to moderate from time to time, should anyone feel inclined to wander over and start something.

There's a link at left as well. Thanks, AC!

The Heavenly Banquet

...by Brigid of Ireland, from Sam & Bethany Torode's compilation Aflame: Ancient Wisdom on Marriage, which attempts, among other things, a gentle refutation of the notion that Christians have always hated, or at least mistrusted, sex - even within the bonds of matrimony.

This particular selection is less about marriage and more about the reception after the wedding, but it works anyway - the married life is bodily in all sorts of ways - and its appeal to me should be obvious.

I would like to have the angels of Heaven
in my own house;
with vats of good cheer
laid out for them.

I would like to have the three Marys,
their fame is so great.
I would like people
from every corner of Heaven.

I would like them to be cheerful
in their drinking.
I would like to have Jesus, too,
here amongst them

I would like a great lake of beer
for the King of Kings
I would like to be watching Heaven's family
drinking it through all eternity.

So much for the old line, "In heaven there is no beer/That's why we drink it here." Poor Brigid - she forgot that it's the fruit of the vine that Our Lord will be drinking in heaven. But the Church does adapt wonderfully to various cultures.

Come to think of it, most of my favorite parties have been wedding receptions.

Six Word Short Story, Round 2

"Always, you'll go back to them."

Outrageous, Part III.

Re: The old thread about bloggers and the future of news. The key line from this article describing news in the age of the "fourth wave": "Less authoritative, more democratic." Seems to be precisely the trade-off we were discussing.

Re: Our local nattering nabob of negativism. Or our resident offensensitive. In response to your objection to Matt's observation about comedy and Jews (care to chime in, Ivy League and Jewish? If you're still watching?), I hereby post the comments of Frank Deford (both in print and on NPR) on the subject of black athletes. I find his observations sound and his remarks unimpeachable myself, and yet for some reason Steve Inskeep of NPR's Morning Edition followed Frank's remarks with the unprecedented disclaimer, "That was the opinion of Frank Deford..." (as opposed to the usual "The comments of Frank Deford..."). Maybe Steve is acutely aware of how rabid is the average NPR listener. (Of course, since NPR itself is floated largely by MultiMegaCorps, Inc., I don't really see the cause for Steve's alarm. Maybe it's a media thing.)

Waiting...

Lessee...it's just after 4 p.m. where First Look editor lives...he's getting toward the end of his workday, end of his workweek. Wonder if he's finished reading it? No reason he should tell me if he is, of course, - he's still got to report back to the rest of the team, and then they have to conference, maybe read it themselves, before making a decision about whether to go ahead and publish...but then again, his is the first opinion, and it surely counts for something...wonder what he thinks of it? Of course, he might not be finished - maybe he's having to make lots and lots of editorial marks...damn...does the silence mean it's terrible? Sigh...

We'll see.

Jukebox

Full bottlle in front of me
Time to roll up my sleeves
And get to work
And after many glasses of work
I get paid
In the brain
- They Might Be Giants, "Your Own Worst Enemy"

Catholic Fiction - Redux

So there's a lot of hullaballoo about Catholic fiction - at least, in the tiny little corner of the blogosphere I frequented today. I'd just like to add this to the mix. No, we don't want evangelical tracts. But it's a strange fictional world in which nobody's Christian, let alone Catholic, seeing as how there are more than a few Jesusy types out and about in the real world. What's wrong with good novels that just happen to include Catholic charcters?

Catholic Artist's Co-Op

More buzz over at Amy's about Catholic fiction. How it's partly a problem of marketing, exposure. Now, Godsbody is hardly big-time, but I think I'm gonna start a section featuring Catholic artists. Not just novelists. Guys like Daniel Mitsui. Guys like this fellow. There's stuff here and there. If it gets pulled together, it might be more noticeable. Please let me know if you have any suggestions.

The Joys of Scavenging...

...feeding off the rotting corpse of obsolete technology, buying five movies for twenty bucks down at Hollywood Video - VHS is on its way out, and I'm happy to pick the bones.
The latest haul: Tron, Master and Commander, The Lavender Hill Mob, Waiting for Guffman, and for the kids, a Pokemon collection.
I had forgotten the religious element in Tron - the bad programs trying to break the peons of their belief in users - grand intellects operating outside the system, to which one could even appeal for help.
The kids loved it, too.

Crawling Out From the Cave...

...eyes blinking in the light, feeling not a little dizzy. Nothing to do now but wait. One editor passes to another, then he gets back to the rest of the publishing people, and they discuss. It's a different book from Scapulars. I really don't know what they'll think.

Buncha new links in the blogs section.
Always Emerging. Sam Torode's musings on being a beginning novelist. More on him anon.
Cosmos, Liturgy, Sex. Pretty self-explanatory, no?
Nordog's Photos. A photo gallery by Norris Harrington, with whom I once had dinner in Hillcrest. Good stuff.
Seldom Sober. I'm one of the old man TAC bloggers. This fellow is part of the Revolution espoused by Redeem the Time. A poet-type. Should update more. (I know, I know, I'm one to talk. But my old man status lets me complain about kids today.)
Studeo. Homeschooling mother of six. Plus, she's thoughty.
You Duped Me, Lord. Mark Mossa, SJ.

More to come. There are lots and lots of things I said I'd get to when the book was done. This is one of them.

Catholic Fiction

Amy's started her novel (check the meter at left).

Jim Manney has a few things to report.

Idylls Press...good name.

Signs and Portents

So. Should I be nervous that my computer is acting up at the very moment that I'm trying to send book two to Loyola?

There will be editing, and editing, and editing to come - that is, if they take the thing. I'll keep you posted.

But it's in. Or will be, if this computer ever decides to send it.

Proposed title: Fingers Crossed That There's A Heaven: True Confessions of a Lousy Catholic

We'll see! All you saints in heaven, pray for us!

Heaven and Hell

Via Maud, a great site devoted to the work of Gustave Dore, of Divine Comedy fame.