The Last Link

It's like it was planned...The Onion interviews Whit Stillman.

(In case you're wondering why I'm posting on the evening of Mardi Gras, it's because the wife is at a Bible Study. Moments in unfortunate scheduling, part umpteenth.)

T-Shirt of the Day, Lenten Edition

Instead of giving up the grape, I think I'm gonna give up the Internet. But I'm gonna try to blog. I'll just have to do it without links. You poor souls. Happy Mardi Gras!

Jukebox

Did I dream
You dreamed about me?

- This Mortal Coil, "Song to the Siren."

Elsewhere

And the rest is silence.

Taking a break, as if this thing wasn't already broken down. Out of town for the remainder of the week. I'll try to mull over the blog a bit.

First Son...

Better known as Little Ed (as in Oedipus)...

Me, as he attacks: Why are you always attacking me?

First Son: This is how every boy acts when he tries to conquer his father!

As entropy yawns and readies to swallow this blog in its freezing maw...

...it's good to remember that, as always, funny can be found elsewhere.

Exchange on a Career in Catholic Writing...

Me: "I've told you before, darling, I could work at the AM/PM."

The wife: "Yeah - 'Would you like cherry or cola Slurpee, sir?' But now that they've installed self-serve Slurpee machines, you've lost that as a backup..."

Man Has a Religious Bone

The question is, how did it get there?

Theology At Home

First Son, age eight: "Dad, it seems that Judas actually did a good thing. Because if he hadn't betrayed Jesus, then Jesus wouldn't have been crucified to take our punishment, and we wouldn't be able to go to heaven."

Me: "Well son, there's a difference between doing good and having good come from an evil act."

First Son: "God probably knew Judas would do that, because God knows everything."

Crap. He's eight, and we're already getting at this.

More Acronyms, Please...

I'm thinking we need to add to that list that American Papist cited in the post below.

MASATU - Medals And Scapulars All Tangled Up

TOBMAS - Theology Of the Body Makes Abstaining Sexy

ROWLOR - Right of Wanderer, Left of Remnant

ARE - Actually Reads Encyclicals

OPOSTS - Owns Piece Of Saint Thomas's Skull

So they're lame. I'm on deadline. Post your own in the comments!

Thank God I'm an Old Man at 32...

...American Papist relates some terrifying yet funny acronyms for Young Catholics...

Art and Sanctity

Mitsui throws down the gauntlet:

"A true sacred artist should try before all other things to present divine truth accurately, regardless of how contrary it is to his own artistic inclinations, regarless of how unappealing he thinks it will be to his audience. And to portray God accurately, he must know God. Art is a sanctified profession, and the rejection of this obligation to sanctity has been degrading Westen art for centuries. We are told that it can't possibly matter - Michaelangelo was (supposedly, at least before Savonarola preached some sense into him) a sexual pervert, Caravaggio was (supposedly) a murderer, Gesualdo was (definitely, but repentantly) a murderer, et cetera. I don't care for the work of some of the artists who are commonly used as examples, but even disregarding that I think the contention silly. A wicked man can create a valid work of sacred art, and a wicked priest can celebrate a valid Mass. Both, however, must be acting upon the Grace of God to do even that - and if they ignore the basic rules for portraying Divinity - or consecrating It on the Altar - they invalidate their efforts. Their profession remains a sanctified one, with holy obligations - and if they are not themselves holy, they damn ought become so."

The Reading for Today

Yeah, I know - posting verses from Scripture? But this hit me after spending too much time bouncing 'round the blogosphere...

"Know this, my dear brothers and sisters: everyone should be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger for anger does not accomplish the righteousness of God."
- James 1:19

Quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger.

Adventures in the Skin Trade...

...while we're at it...

Anybody else out there notice - probably not, since you don't read Defamer and Gawker, you good people, you, and besides, you're not given to notice this sort of thing - that the Gawker Media logo off to the right has finally gone and included Fleshbot, Blog-Lord Nick Denton's wildly successful porn blog? No? Well, I did. Though I wasn't the one that noticed that it wasn't always there. I read that somewhere. Oh, wait - maybe it was just omitted from the media kit. Hm.

Adventures in the Skin Trade...

...the continuing saga...

When even Salon (link may not work) gets huffy about the reduction of women to parts/playthings/fleshy accessories, you know things are getting fun. Mind you, Rebecca Traister has nothing against glossy naked babes:

***

I don't mean to be a scold; I have nothing against nudity in magazines. One of my favorite images from Hollywood issues past is of Sigourney Weaver, dressed in a fishnet body stocking and boots, lying on her back, one breast very visible. The photo was aptly dubbed "The Force." In it, Weaver looked fierce, turned on by her own long body. That picture might fairly have been described as a "Do Me" shot, but it projected an unspoken warning: "Do me wrong, and I'll kick you hard with my big boots." Sienna Miller looks like if you did her wrong she might pop another Klonopin and doze off.

***

But this particular brand of nudity - well, it just isn't empowering enough.

Here's my favorite paragraph:

"Not that Hollywood isn't built -- it has always been built -- in part on skin. But what has made it America's most successful product has been the seesaw tension between the vapidity and the complexity, the aesthetic and artistic, performance and embodiment. As soon as we give ourselves over entirely to the fake, the plastic and the insincere, we destroy the balance, relinquish any hold on film as art, and descend into idiot adolescence."

Hey, if idiot adolescence sells...or wasn't that what you meant by "America's most successful product"?

Home Life

So Second Son goes charging out the door and shuts it behind him before Third Son can follow him into the yard. Third Son opens the door and begins bellowing, in his best two-year-old patois, "How dare you?! How dare you?!"

I'm sure that says something about the character of our home, but I don't want to think about it. Suffice to say, hearing the two-year-old holler "How dare you?" gave delight to our hearts.

Blogging is the future...

...but you may rest assured that Godsbody is living blissfully in the past.

See, I can tell that this is a wonderful, supple new medium. I just can't seem to stay with it. These people seem to get it, however. I'm glad somebody does.

In the meantime, while I sit in the corner and whine and winge about whether I can really believe in this faith that I have been given, other people are coming back to the light out of decidely dark places.

Yeah, I really am suggesting you follow all of those separate links to Wayward Catholic's posts on her leaving the faith and her experience outside the fold. It gets blue, and it gets rough. And it's long. Take your time.

UPDATE: Well, Amy's gone and linked to this story, so now it's big time. My two cents: if ever there was a Catholic blog series that qualified for blog-to-book status, this is it.

What does it mean that we received far more barware at our wedding than china?

Whatever it means, it surely doesn't mean that we (and by we I mean I) need to give up the bottle for Lent this year. Does it?

"Look on the bright side, kiddo...

...you'll go straight to heaven!"

Got Second Daughter baptized on Saturday. A couple of hours ago, the wife got up with her - said she sounded like she had a coughless croup. She got her into a steamy shower, and the little thing seemed to stop breathing. Of course, by the time the paramedics arrived, she seemed okay. The Wife took her in all the same. I said the above to Second Daughter while we waited for the ambulance. Not quite gallows humor...

UPDATE: All is well. Seems babies sometimes do something called periodic breathing. The croup is just a cold. Phew.

Digestion

So I'm sitting in the dentist's office while they go to work capping Third Son's tooth - I do love dropping money on teeth that are gonna fall out - and I pick up a copy of that old standby, Reader's Digest. An interesting juxtaposition - the same issue that included an article which mentioned (and explained) auto-erotic asphyxiation also included, on it's quotable page, the immortal line from Wedding Crashers:

"Some people say we only use 10 percent of our brains; I think we only use 10 percent of our hearts."

Okay, if I were smarter, I would make some joke about how it's hard to use even 10 percent of your brain when you're cutting off airflow so as to heighten the intensity of sexual climax. But I'm not smarter, so I'll just note my astonishment that a magazine that seems to be striving to be relevant to People of Today (the AEA mention came in an article on kids dying from playing The Choking Game) can still fail to pick up on the fact that that line from Wedding Crashers was not intended to be taken seriously. It was a pick-up line.

Sigh.

The Horror

You remember how, in the movie The Manchurian Candidate, Raymond Shaw would snap into a trance at the sound of his name spoken in a certain way? Same thing happens to me when I hear Def Leppard's "Pour Some Sugar On Me (In the Name of Love)." And it didn't even take torture and brainwashing to carve out that neural pathway - just innumerable listenings at high-school dances! (Which, admittedly, involve their own sort of torture and brainwashing.) But for me, the horror is not being placed in the thrall of traitors bent on turning me into a mindless killing machine. For me, the horror is seeing one of the dance chaperones, or whatever they were - grown people, school employees - leaning in to a gaggle of teenagers and screaming along to the lyrics with the best of them. Can you feel my pain?

Here's why I mention it: I've been hearing this thing on the radio of late - whywhywhywhywhy do they adulterate my precious '80s nostalgia this way? - and it turns out I was wrong about the oh-so-suggestive lyrics! I thought:

Take a bottle
Shake it up
Break the bubble
Break it up

Was:

Take your body
Shake it up
Break your Bible
Break it up

Actually, I think mine's better, even if less clearly sugar-related. Go figure.

I'll stop now.

Nicer, perhaps, to read about than to actually read...

Theo Tait on Michel Houellebecq:

Houellebecq has established himself as one of the great international brands of popular literary fiction. But there is a great deal of disagreement over whether he’s a genius, a fraud or a reprobate. Responses to his novels largely fall into three categories. The first is euphoric: Houellebecq as visionary. According to this view, he sees the dehumanising effects of the market, the breakdown of religion and the family, and the unbearable tensions of Western life: the sexual misery, the inevitable conflict between Western morals and Islam...

The second view is that, though his perspective is not necessarily right – and probably rather regrettable – it’s an interesting and prevalent one, and illuminates the attitude of many people in modern France and Europe...This is also true in the realm of sexual politics: he represents unreconstructed man, slavering and masturbatory, whose existence tends to get glossed over in the era of supposed sexual liberation and equality. As an unnamed Dutch academic quoted in a recent Sunday Times profile remarked, he reveals ‘the vile 20 per cent of himself’ that most people keep hidden.

The third attitude is outright disapproval. Houellebecq is a disgusting sexist, racist, eugenicist and pervert, who ought to repulse us. He is a professional provocateur, a marketing whizz, whose success is down to his courting of controversy, to the racist jokes and great dollops of pornography in his work....

The answer, of course, is that Houellebecq is a mixture of all three – and this mixture is probably the key to his success.

(Via Maud.)

That "vile 20 percent that most people keep hidden" seems a rot worth probing...

Reading, RIP

First Son: But Dad, I don't like that book. He doesn't just put what they say and all the action parts!

In other words, "My book isn't a movie!"

Sigh.

To quote REM...

Here comes the flood...

Porn in public. So much for what a person does in the privacy of his/her home...

Via Gawker.

To Paraphrase Strongbad: Unholy Crap!

Village Voice story of priest who alleges in a lawsuit that New York's Cardinal Egan is "actively homosexual." The bishops of Albany and Newark, too.

"I have to tell the truth," he says. "I've gotten enough information to indicate that promiscuity on the part of these bishops is the reason they're covering up clergy abuse."

Good gravy. The story says the suit may never make it to court, so I hope that posting this doesn't amount to little more than detraction and/or slander. It just seems like a really big deal, making this claim in a public legal setting. We'll see.

The Wife Knows How to Make Me Laugh...

"You've got a book published. You're already so far ahead of so many writers who are trying to make it..."

(beat)

"...and yet, you're still at the bottom of the heap."

Laughed harder than I'd laughed all day.

Wait!

Before you skip over this post - and you were, weren't you, you poetry-phobic soul, you - hear us out! This one's short! And it's about booze and food! And it's about me and The Wife! (Note to poets: flattery will get you everywhere.) It's from my friend up in darkest Wisconsin:

The Sweet Success of Now

-for Matthew & Deirdre Lickona
- Late Summer 2005

All day, the hangover hung like brown bats clustered
From brow and heartbeat, awaiting the last blue-grey bird
Of dusk to vanish in time of its own accord.

Then, a dark flurry of dizziness and aches would
Scatter into Wisconsin’s evening, leaving a void
To enjoy by the glow of sipped bourbon’s burning wood.

But no.
Hangover stay sleeping.
Now the meal planned
Out was spilling from its magazine page – I’d pinned
My pride to a menu served by a sweating mind:

The tiki torch ballet beneath the rented tents
Were lit like a chorus of exclamation points
To punctuate friendship’s feast. In ten years, time grants

This much of a gift. And was the sauce worth its salt?
I don’t know. But as a matter of course the food would yield
To wine and talk, these the contributions most felt –

And bats overhead, the garnish on the lily’s gild.

***

I do love the image of hanging bats as hangover. Oh, mercy yes, the sweet release when the next night comes and the bats take wing.

My Boss in the News.

Okay, I've fixed the link twice, and it still keeps sending you to the wrong story. So if you're curious, just click the link and type in "Jim Holman" in the search box. Sorry 'bout that. Dratted Interweb.

Heartbreak...

...here.

Related question: Has any author written fiction about abortion in this way - "this way" being Hemingway's way in Hills Like White Elephants" in recent years?

Via Maud.

Sex and Art

Okay, so evangelicals are really upset because a gay man was cast as one of the leads in End of the Spear. The film tells the story of evangelical missionaries who were slain by members of an indigenous tribe - which tribe was later converted through the efforts of the missionaries' wives. (Um, wow.)

The man who spearheaded the protest, one Reverend Jason Janz, has written, ""Does anyone really believe that Chad Allen was the best possible actor for Nate Saint? "That would be like Madonna playing the Virgin Mary." Or, like, I don't know, Monica Bellucci as Mary Magdalen in The Passion of the Christ. Evangelicals didn't seem to mind that so much.

Oh, wait, I forgot: "Ms Bellucci is not just a typical porn star, but perhaps the most vile in the history of mass-market movie-making." Eep! And it wasn't just the Magdalen, who has been construed on more than one occasion as a fallen woman. Pilate's wife is a porn star as well! And so is Satan! The list goes on! (You've got to say this for the Watch Unto Prayer people - they are thorough!) And yet, The Passion has taken in over $600 million. End of the Spear? $8 million, or $2 million shy of its production budget. Strange and stranger yet.

"But Rachel's blog is funnier...if you want something to shoot for."

That was a reader, offering a friendly bit of advice. Rachel, of course, is the proprietress of Testosterhome. So when she tagged me with this meme, I got out my Solar Death Ray and took careful aim. Something to shoot for, indeed...

Four Jobs I've Had:

1. Staff writer, San Diego Reader. I've written TV listings, cover stories, inside features, a TV column, some food-related stuff, a wine column, a church review, author profiles, events pieces - and, through the extreme generosity of my editor, even served as a cartoonist a couple of times.

2. Admissions Assistant, Thomas Aquinas College. Stayed on campus during my first two summers. Befriended the woman I would eventually marry. Discovered the Coen brothers and Raising Arizona. Imbibed. Had an absolutely lovely time. Wrote a lot of letters extolling the virtues of the school, usually to people who had already decided not to attend. Heady days.

3. Junior Camp Counselor, Camp Ki-Y or some such, a day camp run by the YMCA in Cortland, NY. I'd gone there when I was a kid, and never forgot the evening cookout on the last day of camp, when the Great Spirit (a blonde counselor in full Indian headdress and warpaint) emerged from the the darkness of the pond, standing in a canoe lit by torches fore and aft. He gave a speech about how pleased he was with us, and awarded necklaces with differently-colored plastic bear claws as prizes for Best Archer, Best Swimmer, Best Runner, etc. I treasured mine.

But the year I worked there was the last year that the Y would be able to use the land. Now, we had always been told that there was a swamp monster in the pond - that's why you had to swim in the designated area. I played the swamp monster up for all it was worth. On the final night, it was my turn to play the Great Spirit. I was perhaps even less convincing as an Indian chief than blond dude had been, so I had the kids take me through a ceremony in which I was "possessed" by the great spirit. They dressed me up and painted me, and I knelt and chanted until I could start channeling his message. (Was this wise? Probably not.) Then I stood up and recited a creation myth I had written, one which explained the topography of the campgrounds as the fruit of a tremendous battle between the Great Spirit and the swamp monster. The monster had been imprisoned in the pond - but now, it seemed, because the land had become polluted, the swamp monster's bonds were loosening, and it was no longer safe to have kids come to the spot for camp - my explanation for the camp's having to shift locations.

I recited all this, in my best Basso Profundo, while standing in the canoe. As I finished, I began to rock the canoe from side to side. "The swamp monster!" I cried, just before capsizing the canoe and swimming, underwater, behind the pond in the center of the island, thus giving the impression to the kids (and their parents) onshore that I had never come up. The swamp monster had eaten the Great Spirit. (Was this wise? Do you even have to ask? I was younger then, and even more foolish than I am today.)

4. Assistant gardner and Chief rock hauler for a kindly gentleman on the outskirts of town.

Four Movies I Watch Over and Over Again
1. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
2. His Girl Friday
3. Chariots of Fire
4. The Untouchables
(Rachel got to toss in some seconds, so I will, too: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Quiz Show, Babette's Feast, Dead Poet's Society (at least in high school, which is when I watched movies over and over much more often) Help!, Max Headroom (the original British version). There are probably more, but that's off the top of my head.

Four Places I've Lived
1. San Diego, CA
2. La Mesa, CA
3. Cortland, NY
4. Brookline, MA

Four TV Shows I Watch
1. Arrested Development
2. The Sopranos
3. Lost
4. The Simpsons (been a while, but I've got a bunch of stuff on tape. The rest of these I see on DVD - we killed the TV.)

Four Places I've Vacationed
1. Lake George, in the Adirondacks of upstate New York
2. San Francisco
3. Mohonk Mountain House, in the Catskills
4. Bar Harbor, Maine

Four Websites I Visit Daily
1. Open Book
2. Defamer
3. The New York Times (to my friend Michael's eternal annoyance).
4. The Minor Fall, The Major Lift

Four Of My Favorite Foods
1. sushi - just like Rachel!
2. fresh-squeezed orange juice
3. The Wife's potato gratin
4. bread - Zingerman's deli in Ann Arbor is up there.

Four Places I'd Like to Be Right Now
1. Upstate New York
2. Johnsonville, in darkest Wisconsin (well, maybe not right now - maybe in May.)
3. Rome, with the Wife, staying with people who know the city and would like nothing better than to squire us around all day and show us the secretly best restaurants by night.
4. Yaddo! (Kidding. Mostly.)

Four People I'm Tagging
Lemme think on it.