St. Catherine of Siena...

...whose feast is today, is one of those people who tempt you to think, "Either she was mad, or there really is a God." The bizarre austerities combined with the earthly wisdom combined with the mystical visions combined with the incredible social fluidity...amazing.

Today in Porn, Sheepish Edition

Commentor Mamagiglio wishes I would post less about porn - hence, the "sheepish" in the title. I won't say I can't help myself, but I do find myself thinking, "This needs to be noted."

Allan MacDonell has written a book about his career in the Larry Flynt publishing empire - by the end, he was executive editor of Hustler. In the inevitable NYT profile, we are naturally reassured that, despite his occupation, he has a "very conventional marriage" with his second wife. The story then gives us this perfect gem:

They met roughly 12 years ago on a blind date, and when she heard where he worked, she was a little hesitant, he said, but quickly got over it because "she's incredibly secure with herself." Mr. Flynt attended the wedding, he added, and after meeting that notorious pornographer, Mr. MacDonell's mother-in-law, a devout Roman Catholic, said he was so charming he reminded her of Ted Kennedy.

That last sentence is almost too perfect to spoil with any kind of comment.

Help Wanted

Apparently, I was mistaken. (Apparently, there is nothing new under the sun.) The Catholic Educator's Resource Center is not out of the financial woods. Please consider donating if you find what they're doing at all valuable. Yeah, that's my dad's stuff on the website. But that's not why I'm asking.

Faith and Reason and Writers

The intrepid Maud attended this year's PEN Faith & Reason event, and did us all the favor of posting a lengthy report on the goings on. Her closing statement:

By the end of the night, Russell, a science guy, shared Michael Orthofer’s opinion that the focus of the event was too heavily tilted toward faith, "with reason as the afterthought or occasional counterweight." They’re right: the discussion was largely religion-centered.

Overall (from my agonistic but faith-sympathetic perspective) this focus followed from the idea that religious extremism of various kinds is one of the greatest obstacles to harmony in our increasingly globalized world. Some authors worked toward the notion that faith isn’t inherently bad — that reason, too, can be problematic. Others charged that religious faith is backward or insidious. A few seemed to believe it may be the death of us all.

***

From Maud's report, it doesn't sound like anybody suggested that faith might actually be salvific. From my extremely humble perspective, this may possibly indicate a flaw in PEN's invitation decisions. Would it have killed them to invite one serious believer, one person who saw faith as not only human, not only compatible with reason, but as a real (if still msyterious) and transcendent good? They could've invited Ron Hansen - he's got cred. Or Alice McDermott. Just somebody.

Obedience

If you link only to those who link to you, what is extraordinary about that? Even the pagan bloggers do as much...

Fair enough. But Mine Iron Heart went and linked to me a while back, so, like a good pagan, I paid him a visit, and found this. Very interesting. Essentially, it sounds like the Episcopal bishop of San Diego is forbidding schism and demanding obedience. I wonder if Rome ever issued similar letters to the Episcopalians - and I don't mean that in a smarmy way.

Good paragraphs from the letter, with a couple of can't-help-myself comments:

Let me be clear about the import of this direction. If you and your congregation pursue an effort at secession, you will at that moment be in violation of your ordination vows. By this Pastoral Direction, you will be, by that very act or by your participation, an inhibited priest and deprived of standing or canonical or legal authority to do the very action you purport to effect. In issuing this Pastoral Direction, it is my hope that the issue of congregational secession can be conclusively addressed, and that we can concentrate on what is our common work together.

[But isn't the nature of your "common work" precisely the question that is causing this division? Don't some people think that the Episcopal Church in America is departing from the "common work" in crucial ways?]

Too much time and energy has been spent on this question. Individual clergy and people may choose to leave the church. This is a right that each of us has. But it is not permissible to participate in actions which attempt to remove a constituent part of the Diocese and Episcopal Church from the whole.

[Isn't each member, clergy or otherwise, a constituent part? If they each have the right to leave individually, then why can't a congregation simply say, "Each of us is exercising our right to leave individually"? Or perhaps I'm misunderstanding here.]

At this time in the life of our church, it is imperative that we understand clearly the difference between conscience and the obligations of vows and office. I will always respect individual conscience. But as clergy, we hold vows, and as rectors you hold an office, which includes your bond of trust to me as your bishop....

This Pastoral Direction correctly frames the issue as one of ecclesiastical authority, which is essential to the good order of the Church, and thus calls us back to remain together so that we can serve and care for the people whom God has entrusted to us.

[What is the nature and cause of that authority? And what if the authority is wrong, and is acting in such a way that is not in fact truly caring for "the people whom God has entrusted to us"? Again, not being smarmy - it's a serious question.]

Unspin

Over at About Last Night, Terry has a lovely little rant against spin, one which gets at one of the great crimes against language - the transformation of its purpose from communicating to manipulating (and by "manipulating," I fear we very often mean "selling"). He also includes this:

...the greatest piece of unspin ever uttered by a public figure, General Joe Stilwell’s statement to the press after Japanese troops forced his men to retreat from Burma to India: "I claim we took a hell of a beating. We got run out of Burma and it is as humiliating as hell. I think we ought to find out what caused it, and go back and retake it."

Just imagine if people talked like this. It's part of the reason I loved Thank You For Smoking. For all the smoke being blown in that film, there was a certain, raw, honesty. Same goes for The Squid and the Whale. It's gotten so that I'm grateful to hear the truth, no matter how ugly.

More on Golddiggers...

If I were a better person, I'd figure out a way to say this in a Controlled Cinematic Haiku, but if there's one thing Godsbody isn't, it's a better person...

Amazing to think that there was a time when the aristocracy wanted nothing to do with "the theater." (Reminds me of all those olde-timey saints' admonitions to keep away from the place.) I mean, now, the aristocracy is the theater.

Jukebox

Remember my forgotten man?
You put a rifle in his hand
You sent him far away
You shouted hip hooray
But look at him today
Remember my forgotten man?
- "My Forgotten Man," from Golddiggers of 1933

Aw, who am I kidding?

I'm sure about 98% of you who visit this blog also visit Amy's, and you probably go to her first. So you've probably already seen this. But I'm gonna link to it anyway. There's a real discussion going on in the comments - about NFP, contraception, etc. I think it's worth reading.

Today in Porn, Celebrity Edition

The good people at Defamer have been keeping track of the whole Charlie Sheen-Denise Richards divorce nightmare. See, some people might think that when a guy is married to Denise Richards, he doesn't need to go looking at porn, or, for that matter, paying porn stars for sex. But that's not how the libido works.

I suppose it should be noted, for charity's sake, that Sheen is denying much of this.

(Link contains rough language/unpleasant descriptions.)

First Daughter...

...is five today. Last year, near her birthday, a friend generously invited us to join her and her young man and her young man's family aboard a sailing yacht for a tour of the harbor. They fed us like royalty down in the cabin. So this year, when we asked Little Miss what she wanted to do for her birthday, her reply was immediate: "Go on a boat, like last year." Guess she got a taste for it. The poor thing is going to have to make do with a trip on the Coronado Ferry. Maybe she'll marry well. Happy days!

Jukebox

A propos of the previous two posts...

What's the sense in ever thinking 'bout the tomb
When you're much too busy returning to the womb?
- They Might Be Giants, "Shoehorn with Teeth"

First Son, songwriter...

I missed my trip on the river
Back to childhood
Ever since then my mood, my mood
Ever since then my mood
Has been a bad one
I haven't had any fun
Since I missed my trip on the river...

Memento Mori

Philip Roth has been thinking about death. His new novel is entitled Everyman, an allusion to the medieval morality play, which Roth read:

"It was hair-raising," he said. "All the terror that's in it. It's told from the Christian perspective, which I don't share; it's an allegory, a genre I find unpalatable; it's didactic in tone, which I can't stand. Nonetheless there's a simplicity of approach and directness of language that is very powerful."

In a passage early on, Everyman meets a messenger and says something like, You're not a messenger, and the messenger allows that he is indeed Death. Everyman is startled. He says, 'Oh Death, thou comest when I had thee least in mind.' The line just knocked me for a loop."

Good paragraph in the story:

"This book came out of what was all around me, which was something I never expected — that my friends would die," Mr. Roth said. "If you're lucky, your grandparents will die when you're, say, in college. Mine died when I was a schoolboy. If you're lucky, your parents will live until you're somewhere in your 50's; if you're very lucky, into your 60's. You won't ever die, and your children, certainly, will never die before you. That's the deal, that's the contract. But in this contract nothing is written about your friends, so when they start dying, it's a gigantic shock."

"You won't ever die." That does indeed seem to be the deal, until... Oh death, thou comest when I had thee least in mind.

Lots could be said here...

...Madonna to be crucified. But let's say only this: isn't it interesting that, when it comes time for making an aesthetic impression, however lowbrow, she comes back to the Cratlicks?

Via A Socialite's Life

Potter Triumphant

Here.

Question

So, what Catholic book(s) is everybody hoping to read this summer? Anyone? Anyone?

Aphorism of the Day

A friend passed this along:

"The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work."
- Emile Zola (1840-1902)

Of course, these days, gift and work and all the rest of it are nothing without marketing...

Hello...

Remarkable frankness about sexual damage in this article about Craig Brewer's latest film:

Though "Black Snake Moan" does not yet have a release date, Mr. Brewer is already struggling with what he sees as misperceptions about its sexual dynamics. "It's not about Sam Jackson curing Christina of nymphomania," Mr. Brewer groaned after a reporter read a description of the film that has been posted on numerous Web sites.

"Nymphomania is not a clinical term; it's just something people throw out about women who are promiscuous," Mr. Brewer said. He added, "People want and go after sex, but that's not something that's always a fun and pleasurable ride."

Stephanie Allain, Mr. Brewer's partner in the production company Southern Cross the Dog and the producer of both "Hustle" and "Black Snake Moan," acknowledged that the filmmaker "likes to push things right to the point of exploitation." But she said Ms. Ricci's character's couplings with a wide assortment of men in the film are not about sexual gratification.

"Christina's character is someone who was a victim of childhood sexual abuse and looks everywhere for love and is filled with anger because she's never found it," Ms. Allain said. "The story turns when she's spiritually confronted by a man who's consumed with anger because the woman he's loved all his life has left him."

Um...

Technical difficulties here at Godsbody. A certain, shall we say, repetitive character to things. A certain, shall we say, repetitive character to things. Please stand by.

Fiddleback and Mantilla..

...a fantabulous band name?

...no, wait - better: a crimefighting duo. "Put down that sledgehammer, Etradicator! This is one set of olde-timey stained glass windows you won't smash in the name of updating!" (Fiddleback slings his Thurifer, which, much like Thor's hammer, always returns to him, and knocks the hammer from Etradicator's hand.) "Mantilla! Give him a little of that genuflexion action!" (Mantilla drops to one knee; as her knee touches the ground, a bolt of energy flashes from the point of contact, knocking Etradicator senseless, or at least offending his sensibilities.)

Sorry. Things that come to you in the back of church while you wrestle your two-year old...

If I Had Talent...

...plus connections, or mojo, or whatever it takes to get a short story into The New Yorker...

I would have long ago made hay out of married novelists Jonathan Safron Foer and Nicole Krauss, who recently published Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and The History of Love, respectively. The couple at home in the aftermath of publication, quietly comparing reviews, especially the reviews that compare their books to one another. Quietly noting ad sizes, lengths at book tours, crowds at readings. Quietly checking each other's Amazon page for customer response (and quietly recruiting friends to bolster their own ratings). When it looks like she's doing better, he naturally puts on his best face, but still, irrationally, feels emasculated. Why couldn't she have been a playwright? When it looks like he's doing better, she naturally puts on her best face, but feels marginalized. "Oh, you write, too? That's just wonderful!" As if it were a hobby, like gardening. And then they would come across something like this, and in discussing it, all that quietness would give way to something rather more animated. What fun!

Today in Porn, Advertising Edition

File under Sex Sells...but this time, with good wages and benefits!

"The ads are also highly suggestive, and not just because they are showcasing underwear or clingy knits. They depict young men and women in bed or in the shower; if they are casually lounging on a sofa or sitting on the floor, then their legs happen to be spread; frequently they are wearing a single item of clothing but are otherwise undressed; a couple of the young women appear to be in a heightened state of pleasure. These pictures have a flashbulb-lighted, lo-fi sultriness to them; they look less like ads than photos you'd see posted on someone's Myspace page."

Whoa

American Papist has coverage of the coverage of Cardinal Martini's comments on the legitimacy of condom use by a spouse infected with HIV/AIDS.

American Papist also has an mp3 of a debate between Janet Smith and Charles Curran on the topic of contraception.

(Found via Amy.)

UPDATE: Amy has a little more info on the matter.

Help Wanted

First Things is looking for a new managing editor. I'd send in a resume, but the job's in NYC, and if I went there, who would pick all these limes? (See previous.) Plus, I'm kinda simple. But my readers are bright - so go apply, already.

Signs and Wonderments

When the lemon tree, given pride of place with lots of sun and a killer hole filled with top-notch soil, all but fails to produce, and the lime tree, tucked into a shady corner almost as an afterthought, goes crazy with fruit, is this a sign that God wants me to drink more gin?

Great Insults from Old Movies

"It must have been tough on your mother, not having any kids."
- Anytime Annie, 42nd Street

Question

Does the American economy depend on our being habitual consumer/disposers?

Put another way: if everyone practiced thrift - binding up, repairing, making do - would the American economy survive?

I think of this when I'm driving past those huge car lots - so many cars, new models every year. Here I am, with a 9 year old minivan (into which I just put a new engine) and a 12 year old SUV (which I reluctantly bought from a friend who needed the money, but have since been glad to own - 9 seats!). I can't see myself ever buying another new car.

I think of it when I'm in these giant stores - say, Target. So. Much. Stuff. I wear pants until they get holes in them, shirts until the collars fray. I'm not trying to argue that I'm particularly virtuous - far from it. I'm just wondering at all those racks of clothes.

It's an honest question, not a loaded one - I'm curious what y'all think.

UPDATE: Oh, heck, let's load the question a little bit, just for kicks: everybody remember Big Box Mart?

Dirty Hobos

John Hodgman won my undying admiration when he penned the following response in his McSweeny's column, Ask A Former Professional Literary Agent, to a fellow who was interested in receiving a dump truck full of money for his brilliant satires:

John Kellogg Hodgman, Former Professional Literary Agent: You are right to conclude that book publishers love to spend money on satire. Traditionally, humor battles only poetry and jazz criticism for the title of most lucrative prose form, and that is why editors who specialize in these fields wear lots of jewelry and furs and silk.

Only poetry and jazz criticism...genius. He forgot Catholic fiction, but we'll forgive him that.

Anyway, Hodgman recently did an interview with The Onion AV Club, in which he reveals the following terrifying story about one of my favorite childhood songs. He's not only funny; he shatters your fondest illusions! What's not to love?

There's a famous children's song called "The Big Rock Candy Mountain," but it's not a children's song at all. It's an old hobo folk song describing the hobo Valhalla where cigarettes grew on trees and streams of alcohol trickled down the rocks, and there'd be a lake of gin and whiskey. Handouts grew on trees. Harry McClintock [who popularized it] said a lot of people think this song was written by the hobos as a type of pied-piper tune to sing as they went through towns, to try to bring children with them. He goes on to explain that the most valuable possession a hobo could have would be a child who would do his begging for him—then McClintock said mysteriously, "and other things." I'm like, "What the hell?" I had been really worried that people were going to find the hobo material [in Expertise] offensive, because on one hand, they might confuse the hobo material with making fun of contemporary homelessness, which is the last thing that I'm interested in doing.

I felt the obligation to do a certain amount of research in this area, and what I discovered—quite to my horror and surprise—was that the hobos had this "road kid" culture, that hobos would have homosexual relationships with young men that they would lure onto the hobo road. I'm talking early teens. The hobo slang is so colorful and evocative, but I discovered this culture infected a whole different realm of hobo slang that was just awful and dispiriting, so a hobo's road kid might be called his "possesh." A road kid's life was much like a punk in prison—about serving the hobo master until he could become strong enough to become a hobo in his own right. I did a fair amount of casual research on hobos, and it never came up until I heard this song.

Catholic Educator's Resource Center...

...or CERC, continues to expand its coverage. Yeah, there's a familiar name in among the articles...

More Gay

So Gay Talese got a chunk of the aforementioned memoir excerpted in the New York Observer. Fun bit for a hack wino memoirist like me to read:

Once as I sat sweating over a story, fearing that I might miss the deadline, I heard a veteran reporter calling to me from across the room: “C’mon, young man, be done with it! You’re not writing for posterity, you know.” I did not know. I was habitually late in delivering stories because I constantly rewrote them, believing that what I wrote would be preserved eternally on microfilm in the archives of Ochs’s enduring paper of record. We journalists, in my view, were the preeminent chroniclers of contemporary happenings, the foot soldiers for the historians.

With time, however, I begrudgingly acknowledged my older colleague’s remark. We were not writing for posterity. We journalists seemed at times to be allied with the fast-food industry, being the short-order cooks for consumers of often half-baked information and ideas.

Memoir

So Gay Talese has a memoir coming out, a book that is stitched together from various stories, with Talese as the thing that binds them all together. How very interesting. Of course, he's Gay Talese, so his book gets this loving profile in the Times...

Fun quote: "I suppose there's a part of me that resists taking the easy way," Mr. Talese said recently, sitting in his underground room and holding a hand up to his forehead like a swami reading his own mind. "As an old self-flagellating Catholic, I need to suffer, and something has to be hard to be worthy."

Godsbody, scouring pop culture...

Poetry Corner

JOB is at it again...but they're short! Read 'em! Some lovely wordplay in among the spiky stanzas... you gotta love "ogling theologians"...

Better Angels

They were liked so much and so repeated
In architecture and sartorial stonework
Of old Rome – these, here, the better angels,

The better angels, the angels that bred
The beautiful angles of Renaissance
In the granite quarries that conceived them.

Popes and doges would want to keep them
Around, incarcerated reminders
That the world is here for a little space

A dash of time, a few spasms of pleasure
And then history takes over, set to redraft
Civilization’s cliff-hanging garden

As God’s grand exfoliating finale –
Bluish sunrays fan out from bruised clouds: emblems
Of descent in visual clichés – liked so much –

The better angels, the better angels
Falling down, pitching from precipices,
Convinced of their own stoic performances.

***

The Gargoyles Return
- to M.L.

This fixation with grotesques’ gross-weight stone
Began its search in bog and marsh for mired
Delight’s disgust: rock slime sluiced and swallowed
By rain-swelled creeks; ooze beading black plates of shale.

In time I took bullet-like between the eyes,
Familiar as scum-skimmed ponds of mossy rock,
These guttural spirits perched in pictures of
Notre Dame, Chartres, Grand Central Station…

These fanged and ogling theologians – like
Stalagmites built up from their stony drip
Into bodies of beautiful ugliness –
Have hampered nothing in me or my quest:

The dizzy apocalypse of their return
Steeped in malevolence – like ashen crows –
They dare the rain from parapets and plinths
Like gravity’s own loci genii.

A Baptism is in Order...

So, apparently, Katie Holmes' dad is a grandfather. Which means he has a chance to atone for his utter failure to rescue his daughter, and see to it that little Suri gets her Original Thetan, er, Sin removed through water and the Holy Spirit. He can call it "liquid auditing" if it makes some people feel better.

Eating

A really good potato gratin is far better after it has had a couple of days in the fridge for the flavors to meld together - the nutmeg, the gruyere...

Godsbody - so religious that we hardly ever have to mention religion!

Parenting

When are children happiest? At the precise moment before screams of excitement and hilarity become screams of rage and pain and sorrow. To ask them to settle down is to ask them to give up some measure of happiness.

CCH

King Kong (surely someone has already suggested the alternate title of King Long):

Beauty killed the beast
But computer gimmickry
Killed movie magic

Art in the desert...

Joseph Bottum muses about Catholic art post-Vatican II. It's a topic dear to my heart.

Catholic Chat

Great line from last night's delightful dinner guest:

"The Catholic sandbox is very small. People really do need to learn to play nice."

He is Risen...

...and so are they. They were supposed to stay in their room until seven. They broke down and begged us to go downstairs at five fifty. They slept later on Christmas. Naturally, they were eager to get downstairs and sing the Easter chorus they'd been rehearsing all Lent. Or, to be perfectly precise, to find their Easter baskets.
The Easter bunny left Daddy some Tres Generacions Tequila and some salt and pepper Kettle Chips. Such a generous fellow.
Happy Easter, everybody.

Jukebox

It might sound silly
for me to think childish thoughts like these
but i'm so tired of acting tough
and i'm gonna do what i please
let's get married
in a big cathedral by a priest
cause if i'm the man that you love the most
you could say i do at least

- Hotel Yorba, by The White Stripes

Godsbody, scouring pop culture for religious references since 2005.

Scrutinies

Is a lovely blog by a teacher who calls herself Anonymous Teacher Person, even though she's really not, sort of. Just another place to go when you're tempted to pound your monitor and cry "Be more funny!" while visiting this blog.

When I Go To Hell...

...should probably be a recurring theme on this blog.

Just got a spam email for some stock I need to invest in. But before the stock-talk was this stream of words:

cavalier thicken as aplomb small fry at radon falsetto as dumbbell as
telephone to strong, word processor of dark as accompaniment thereafter vicious, flutist,. and refreshingly the an stakeout,
microbe tribulation, swoon riddled mystic corresponding everything in attacker fizzy unify, to babe but an
minimum wage shout to kaput speedboat!
yep beset the to cleanser with label, shrank dizziness bleakly to puma welsh shortcut sky-high! monogamous the rough-and-tumble a that spatial blare
bait warning brethren as leap year the glowing of postpone the of? condense a that nominally to respective, in cave probation officer: of parallel...

When I go to hell, this sort of stuff will probably be shouted in my ear. The nonsense of it is so, so jarring - the mind keeps trying to find sense, find a sentence, find a thought...

Memento Mori

Muriel Spark has died.

He descended into hell...

Is it odd to have a favorite line from the Creed? This is certainly one of mine. There is no depth to which He will not go, has not gone, for the sake of souls.

Bread

Lord, but fasting is good for me. I begin to recall a title from college...belly-god. I am so very attached to the flesh.

Godly Books

A friend sent the following collection of lists. Interesting to note the quantity of religious titles... I think "The Manxman" sounds fantastic.

BESTSELLERS 1895

1. Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush - Ian Maclaren. Dodd, Mead
2. Trilby - George du Maurier. Harper Brothers
3. Adventures of Captain Horn - Frank R. Stockton. Scribner
4. The Manxman - Hall Caine. Appleton
5. Princes Aline - Richard Harding Davis. Harper
6. Days of Old Lang Syne - Ian Maclaren. Dodd, Mead
7. The Master - Israel Zangwill. Harper Brothers
8. The Prisoner of Zenda - Anthony Hope. Holt
9. Regeneration - Max Nordau. Appleton
10. My Lady Nobody - Maarten Maartens. Harper Brothers


BESTSELLERS 1944

1. Strange Fruit - Lillian Smith. Reynal & Hitchcock
2. The Robe - Lloyd C. Douglas. Houghton Mifflin
3. A Tree Grows In Brooklyn - Betty Smith. Harper
4. Forever Amber - Kathleen Winsor. Macmillan
5. The Razor's Edge - W. Somerset Maugham. Doubleday
6. The Green Years - A. J. Cronin. Little, Brown
7. Leave Her to Heaven - Ben Ames Williams. Houghton Mifflin
8. Green Dolphin Street - Elizabeth Goudge. Coward-McCann
9. A Bell for Adano - John Hersey. Knopf
10. The Apostle - Sholem Asch. Putnam


BESTSELLERS 1962

1. Ship of Fools - Katherine Anne Porter. Little, Brown
2. Dearly Beloved - Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Harcourt Brace
3. A Shade of Difference - Allen Drury. Doubleday
4. Youngblood Hawke - Herman Wouk. Doubleday
5. Franny and Zooey - J. D. Salinger. Little, Brown
6. Fail Safe - Eugene Burdick & Harvey Wheeler. McGraw Hill
7. Seven Days in May - Fletcher Knebel & Charles W. Bailey. Harper
& Row
8. The Prize - Irving Wallace. Simon & Schuster
9. The Agony & the Ecstasy - Irving Stone. Doubleday
10. The Reivers - William Faulkner. Random House

Good Friday

This is a poem I wrote when I was a kid. I have no idea of its quality, either theological or aesthetic. It's just stuck with me.

Crucified, Christ hangs there still
And bids us do His Father's will;
And every time we yield to sin
We drive the nails still deeper in.

Parenting

Lessee, Mom's gone, Second Daughter is in the carseat here in the office, awake and bored. Occupy, occupy, distract, distract... Ah, this CD is nice and shiny - and reflective! And here's a cable for connecting the camera to the computer! Lace it through the middle of the CD, loop it over the bar of the carseat, stick the cable in her hand and the CD at eye level...happy baby.

It Talks

I should save this for Good Friday, when mortification is more the order of the day, but Feed The Blog...

I went and did an interview with Loyola about Swimming with Scapulars, and Loyola went and put it online.

First person to comment on how dangerously close I come to sounding like I'm trying to do an impression of Kermit the Frog is very, very mean. It was early, and I'd just driven up to Anaheim from San Diego. Yeah, that's it.

Good people that they are, they edited out the weeping, the screaming, and the gibbering. However, they left in the general incoherence.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled blogging.

Leave It To The Japanese

to take our technology to places we didn't know we wanted it to go. And you know we want it to. Because we like to be told how to feel--e.g., by soundtracks (come on, admit it, you wish your life had one; it's why we always keep one earbud in)--so why not by this?

Actually, I think this could be just as effective at stimu-manipu-lating emotion as music (what makes you more nostalgic, for example, than the smell of Grandma's house?)--assuming, of course, you can forget you're being fumigated. Hey, if people dig aroma-therapy, they'll love aroma-theater, eh?

Personally, I can't imagine that Terrence Malick would care for this much. But then, I haven't seen this latest offering of his; perhaps he's made the perfect piece of cine-crap to go with this sort of thing.

Acronym...

Now, I don't want to start any fights or cast any stones, but the idea of this tickled me:

Grumpy Old Liturgists Griping Over Traditional Hymns and Acclamations - GOLGOTHA

I'm sure y'all could do better with something along these lines. Have at it in the comments.

Cary Grant's Star Given Star On Hollywood's Walk of Fame

ROOTERS NEWS SERVICE, DATELINE: HOLLYWOOD - Cary Grant's Hollywood Walk of Fame Star was given its own Star in a special ceremony today. The move was reportedly designed to separate the famous-famous, or "talented," from the merely "famous." "The stars were getting a little too, shall we say, dim," quipped Hollywood fame-watcher Fawn Pawsworth. "Winnie the Pooh? He had a certain pillowy innocence, but I don't think I'm going too far when I say that he was little more than a cartoon - hardly someone to compare with a master like Cary Grant, who managed to combine effortless charm and sophsitication with a touch of menace, yet still remain scrumptiously lovable. And don't even get me started on Britney Spears. 'Spectacular' and 'spectacle' are different words, you know. Cary Grant's star outshines stars like these the way the sun outshines a lighter held up at one of Ms. Spears' 'concerts.' It deserves this kind of recognition."
Few would contest Mr. Grant's star power. However, some jaded Gen-Xers ironically drinking Pabst in a Williamsburg bar were quick to criticize the move. "Haven't we already been through enough of this meta crap?" asked Stubble McSeenit, who works at the Gap for the irony factor, and also for money. "I mean, everybody's already made a joke about an awards show for the best awards show. Isn't a star for a star just a riff on that old line? And this isn't even a joke, apparently. Which, I guess, does increase the humor of it. So I guess I can't complain. Darn."
Cary Grant's star maintained a dignified silence, as did the star awarded to his star. However, those close to the star seemed awfully pleased with themselves.

So it ain't The Onion. So sue me.

FTB

Feed The Blog.

CCH

Thank You For Smoking

Living with yourself
Is easy; it's the children
Who complicate things

Or

Honesty is best
Especially when seeking
pure comic genius

Or

Puff, sip, shoot, puff, sip
So many pleasures in life
Are tied up with death

Or

The devil may wear
A lobbyist's face; but then
he might wear yours, too

Very, very funny movie.

Drinking From A Box...

Boxed wine is, of course, a wonderful idea. A collapsible bladder inside the box shrinks as the wine is dispensed, allowing for gradual consumption without the danger of oxidation. Sadly, a lot of the wine that gets put into US boxes is less wonderful than the idea itself. But just as screwcaps are gradually making headway into a world once dominated by corks - screwcaps never produce cork taint - the boxes are starting to catch on. I've heard the stories for some time about the great boxed wines in Australia and France, and even thought hopeful thoughts about a few local products. But when Delicato started putting their marvelous bargain Shiraz in a three-liter (four-bottle!) box, I was able to give full and happy assent. In bottles, the stuff never goes for less than $4.99. A three-liter box is $17.99. That's $4.50 per bottle's worth of wine. Good stuff, happy days.

From old wounds...

...deliver us, O Lord.

It makes a body feel ridiculous - some resentment from the past bubbling up and chirping, "I'm still here!" It's clear there's still some liquor left for it to drink - otherwise, it'd make like any other bad guest and leave. Here comes Holy Week.

Call for Headers

Sorry for the silence. Helluva day yesterday. Capped off by Third Son, the two-year-old, somehow opening the door to the rented dumptruck parked in front of the garage, then releasing the parking brake, which, since the truck has no Park feature on its tranny, was the only thing holding it in place on the extremely gentle slope at the bottom of my driveway. The truck rolled gently forward on the gentle slope, and the fiberglass front panel buckled and snapped in delicious slow motion as six tons of slow moving metal pressed against the stucco corner. Bent fender, too. I got to watch it happen - I was on my way to the truck at the time.

So what I'm looking for are headers for a post about such an event. A few thoughts to get y'all started:

Children Are Expensive

Don't Throw That Switch!

Look Mommy, I'm Driving

More as I think of them. Please add your own in the comments.

Commentary

Standing in line for confession today down at St. Joseph's Cathedral, behind a stout middle-aged woman carrying a denim handbag with brown leather piping and strap. The bag - knockoff or otherwise - had one of those designer symbols, an interlocking G and C or some such. But over the C, the woman had placed a sticker depicting one of those Wal-Mart smiley faces. It was obviously a brilliant and subversive comment of some kind, but I couldn't dope it out. (I have no idea if I'm being serious here. What say y'all?)

Howcum?

Howcum Neko Case can do a song like John Saw That Number (which is extra-specially wonderful), and yet if a so-called "Christian Band" did anything half so explicitly religious, they'd be ignored? I know - the question stands only if you grant the idea that a so-called Christian Band could do something quite so extra-specially wonderful.

Old John the baptist, old John divine
Leather harness round his line
His meat was locust and honey
Wild honey lord, wild honey

John saw that number
Way in the middle of the air
Cryin' holy, holy to the Lord

Old John the baptist, old John divine
Frogs and snakes are gonna get John this time
God told the angel "go see about John"
So he flew from the pit with the moon round his waist
Gathered wind in his fists so the stars round his wrists
Cryin' holy, holy to the lord

Read the revelations, you'll find him there
Third chapter, fourth verse where he said unto me
"There's a beast that rose out of the sea"
Ten crowns, ten crowns
On his horns write "blasphemy"
John couldn't read it (John couldn't read it)
Get on repeat it
John couldn't read it
Holy, holy to the Lord

There was a man, a pharisee
Who came by night to meet him
Said "I know thy teacher came from God cause no man can do such miracles
Without the lord to entreat him"
God told the angel "go see about John"
So he flew from the pit with the moon round his waist
Gathered wind in his fists and the stars round his wrists
Cryin' holy, holy to the Lord
Holy, holy to the Lord
Holy, holy to the Lord...

First Son...

Me: Why don't you want to ask your mother for whatever it is you're going to ask her when I'm in earshot?

First Son: Because you're the bricks, Dad.

First verse, first lines...

Entropy's
Got the best of me
Think I been spread too thin
Whatever I gather
Just gets scattered
Out through the split in my skin

Because I don't have a band...

...y'all get to suffer through the songwriting process...

Opening chorus:

Tyin' up these loose ends into a noose
Gettin' settled in my chair so they can turn on the juice
Make amends
With my friends
To prepare for the end
I got the last thing on my mind

Why does this stuff come to me?

Gifted?

So First Son might have a musical bone. He's certainly the first in the family to be able to pick out tunes on the piano by ear - classical, rock 'n roll, whatever. If he hears it and he likes it, he can plunk it out. Who woulda thunk it?

Title for my next country song:

"Tying Up These Loose Ends Into A Noose"

Today in Porn, Humor Edition

So when the carpenter came to visit, he brought JOB's copy of The Florence King Reader. The carpenter is gone, but the book remains. The book contains King's flat-out hilarious novel, When Sisterhood Was In Flower, which in turn contains King's flat-out hilarious account of her protagonist's days as a writer of porns, which in turn contains the following gem:

***

Around this time, I came across an anti-porn essay by Pamela Hansford-Johnson, who claimed that the literary worthlessness of porn can be proved by transposing its style to a description of the boiling and eating of an egg. I gave it a try and came up with this:

I took the glistening, virginally white oval out of the fiercely bubbling cauldron of hot, hot, hot water and cupped my hand around it, feeling its countours with sensations of shimmering delight. I reached for my long, sturdy, battering egg knife and tapped. The shell slipped off and I touched the tender, moist, protein-swollen membranes of the secret softness. The steamy slice of hot, ready, delectable egg burned my fingers but I thrust firmly with my rigid tool and inserted the erect, serrated blade. The lubricious, golden yellow, ambrosial nectar of the pulsating, quickening core gushed out into my egg cup. I centered my mouth over the slickened surface of the gently curving silver spoon and ate, ate, ate.

When I finished this exercise, I stared at my long, yellow, blue-lined Nixonian legal pad in horror...

(Hat tip to the carpenter.)

Fragment

"Oh, dear. I'll say a prayer for you," she said, and something in her tone and manner made him think, just for a moment, that she actually would.

CCH

A History of Violence

The past isn't dead
But converts happen, dammit
Even when haunted

But seriously folks - if you want to see a great film about a man's demons coming back to haunt him, go rent Unforgiven. This one rings false in too many places (spoilers, I guess):

The wife asking, "Is it a switch you flip on and off?" A ridiculous question - we're given every reason to believe that she's seen this man every day for sixteen years or so, raised a family with him, had a happy marriage with him. She knows what kind of man he is now, regardless of what he might have been earlier. She knows he hasn't been throwing any switches, and she knows the horror that made him slip back into his old self this time. Sure, she feels betrayed, but she's too smart to be talking like that.

The son's little speech when Dad comes home from the hospital. It's bad canned dialogue, and it's the sort of thing that might be said by a kid who doesn't give a hoot for his father, and is just looking to score points. It's not the speech of a kid in pain - pain that arises upon discovering the sins of the father he loves.

While we're at it, this exchange was false as well:

"In this family, we don't solve problems by hitting people."
"No, in this family, we shoot them."

Again, not how the son would talk. As if he doesn't understand the difference between a school bully and guys with guns getting ready to rape a woman. The children in this film are props to deliver points - the attitude that violence is what bad people have coming to them, the way violence reverberates across generations, etc. The child-as-prop comes across most clearly at the very end - when a little girl's beloved Daddy comes home after being away, she lights up and runs to him. She doesn't sit (as she does in the film) in anxious silence, then hesitatingly get his dinner plate for him. Unless of course, Mom's told her that Dad is a monster, and we have no reason to suppose that Mom would do that - she's already covered for him for the sake of keeping the family together.

An impressive performance from Viggo, but not a great study of violence. In the Bedroom might be a better modern example.

Jukebox of sorts

A very kind soul sent me a Pedro the Lion CD today. At the top of the lyric sheet: A good person is some one who hasn't been caught.

Otherwise, nothing to report. Sick day.

Megachurch

Had occasion to talk to someone who worked at a megachurch the other day. They were going to be putting on a Good Friday service, which I found interesting. The person acknowledged that part of the reason was that about 60 percent of the congregation came from a Catholic background.