The Kids Are Alright...

...and besides, they asked so nicely. I was honored by the request.

The latest issue of Dappled Things ("The Catholic literary magazine for young scholars and the young at heart") is up, and it seems that I went and gave 'em an essay and a short story, ripped from the unpublished pages of Book Two. An advance advance excerpt, if you will.

These folks limit their contributors to the under-35 set, which makes me something of an elder statesman - hoo! But seriously - I'd love to see the thing succeed. The notion of young Catholics interested in art sounds good to me. So I tossed my ante in. We'll see what comes. If you wander over and read, I do hope you enjoy.

Last Keillor post...

...really. I promise. I'm sure you're all pretty tired of these.

But it strikes me, upon reading these various suggestions that Keillor's heart is with the urban elite, that his sensibility has fled his small-town roots and mores, that certain particulars give the lie to this notion. I've got a lot of Prairie Home Companions on tape - a neighbor used to tape them, or at least The News from Lake Wobegon. And there's one bit that has stayed with me especially well, though not so well that I can recall it verbatim.

Keillor was broadcasting from New York at the time, and he spoke (his tone dripping with derision) about a New York performance artist who was ruminating on The End of Civilization. Later in the episode, he discussed a husband and wife, sitting at the kitchen table before the sun came up, drinking coffee and putting life back in order after the previous day's chaos. He said something like, "These people don't talk about the end of civilization. For these people" - i.e. parents - "civilization is a job." The audience thundered its approval. It was a great line, and hardly the notion of the urban elite: civilization is the passing on of a tradition, a heritage, a culture. You can sit by the wall and predict its end, or you can roll up your sleeves and keep it going.

The Jesus Year

Johnny Depp, playing notoriously, gloriously bad director Ed Wood, lay abed with his girlfriend and fretted that Orson Welles had made Citizen Kane at the tender age of 26 - while he, Wood, was already 30. But by 33, Jesus (who is, after all, supposed to be my exemplar) had redeemed humanity and opened the gates of heaven. I need to get on the stick. Mortality ain't just a nine-letter word.

Waugh's Mr. Joyboy would be proud, I think.*

Friend of Godsbody (FOG - how appropriate) Aunt Smokee passes along this amazing innovation in the memorial business.

"Our urns are so soft and cuddly that it makes you want to hug them. It's nice to
know that your loved one's final resting place is in one of these Huggable Urns
and always around you ready to hug when ever you feel the need."

*Mr. Joyboy provided courtesy of The Loved One.

Our Lady of Las Vegas

...is where my Goddaughter was baptized. Fascinating church, combining as it does elements from so many different styles (not that I'm any sort of expert). Fra Angelico. A style I have come to think of as classic '50s American Catholic. Celtic? Iconography. Mission (the ceiling). Art Deco. '70s stained-glass (post Vatican II trippy color panels, but still holding onto tradition a little bit with the faces). More iconography, this time with a more Russian tinge? Gothic (the lamps) and Roman (the pillars).

Off to Vegas

I'm thinking I'm gonna take the kids' college fund and double it. I'll bring 'em along for good luck. While I'm there, I'll become Godfather to The Wife's cousin's new little one. Then I'll come home, possibly late, late, Sunday night, smelling of money. Toodles!

"Let's Bury Paul"/"Cranberry Sauce."

Pardon the olde-timey Beatles reference of the title, but I'd like to take the occasion to start my own brand of Paul-is-dead rumorbuzz: Where's Strongbad?. It's now been over a month since the Brothers Chaps gave us anything new, which in Internet years is roughly three millenia. There's a limit to how long we can hang at The Institute of Official Cheer, killing time and thinkin' 'bout the King of Town. Okay, maybe that's not true.

"I'm not even a chef any more, and it breaks my heart."

That's Thomas Keller talking in Michael Ruhlman's The Reach of a Chef. The New York Observer gives an excellent review of a book that tries to grapple with the arrival of celebrity to the culinary world.

"Even Thomas Keller, whose restaurant the French Laundry helped revolutionize American cuisine, has changed tracks. Mr. Keller, Mr. Ruhlman’s hero and collaborator (they’ve written two cookbooks together) and a living saint if there ever was one, left the Napa Valley for Las Vegas, New York and the ambiguous commercial world, lending his name to signature lines of knives and porcelain. 'The chef has left the kitchen,' Mr. Ruhlman says. What he really means is that the priest has left the altar."

Gosh.

Homiletic and Pastoral Review (more specifically, Adam DeVille) gave my book a very kind review, for which I am deeply grateful.

My Tallahassee Purgatory

...is another personal essay over at Godspy worth checking. And it includes a description of the Godsbody family parish!

"Our Lady of the Rosary was a good antidote for that. OLR, as the parishioners call it, is a small Catholic church nestled in the heart of San Diego’s Little Italy. It’s one of those churches that make you look up, literally. Above the altar, across the entire front wall is a painting of the Crucifixion. At the back of the church, along the opposite wall is the Final Judgment. High above on each side wall, the apostles and evangelists keep watch from their perch, and if you are bold enough to arch your head straight back and look up at the ceiling, you will be greeted by scenes from the various mysteries of the rosary. Only the hardest of hearts could gaze at the Crucifixion scene above the altar and not be pierced with sorrow. Only the proudest could look at the scene of the Final Judgment and not say, 'I am dust.'"

About that Keillor Bio...

Sam Anderson takes a stab at the Keillor psyche:

"It may be that Keillor is so allergic to Henri-Lévy's love of paradox because, though he'd never acknowledge it, his own public image is deeply paradoxical. He's a cosmopolitan provincial (he's lived in Copenhagen and owns a multimillion-dollar apartment on Central Park West) and a sophisticated simpleton (a plainspoken yarn-spinner who just happens to write world-class prose). Once you start thinking about this—once Keillor's trademark simplicity begins to look complicated and unnatural—the paradoxes start tumbling out like herrings out of the pickle-barrel: His plainness seems pretentious, his anti-bombast bombastic, his anti-snobbery snobbish. This sense of affectation is why some people instinctively dislike such a likable entertainer."

This is the fascinating thing about Keillor - he was a small-town boy who yearned to write for the sophisticated, big-city New Yorker. And he made it - but he made it by bringing the small town with him to the big city. He's at his best when he draws from that small-town ethos and sensibility - but there's always a measure of self-consciousness about it. The artist's distance?

Glad also to see that Anderson noticed that Keillor knows how to write. The Book of Guys has some bits that are genuinely laugh-out-loud funny.

Why does this make us so happy?

The Coreys, reunited at last.

I don't know why this should matter to me - I never even saw the films Mr. Defamer mentions. But what I did see, several times, was The Lost Boys, aka, the film that made a generation think Kiefer Sutherland was cool, twenty years before 24. I remember Haim and Feldman as the perfect comic relief for the sizzling homoerotic tension between seductive vampire Sutherland and tortured Jason Patric.

(And if anyone takes that bit about "homoerotic tension" seriously - well, it's your own fault.)

Today in Porn, Catholic Edition

Porn and the Sacred Heart, a personal essay at Godspy. Worth reading, I think. Do go take a look:

"It’s been eight months since I made love to my wife. Eight months since the birth of our daughter. Sometimes there are tears of frustration. Sometimes, I take secret pleasure in a sexual purity that I haven’t known since the fifth grade. The stains of my sexual brokenness, that I thought had been cleansed by marriage, can’t hide any longer behind the sloth of a satisfied husband in bed. I lay awake at night hoping that this celibacy is not permanent, but that the chastity—my own properly ordered sexuality—might be. This isn’t purity based on unknowing, as if my mind could somehow regain the innocence of my prepubescent past. Rather, it’s the purity that comes when you admit there are some corners of the devil’s hell you still find overwhelming erotic, but still, once more, you decide to look away."

What's consoling

...is to speak to someone whose faith has caught fire, for whom prayer is sweetness, evangelism an easy account of friendship, and daily life an adventure in trust in the divine will.

A little jealous-making, too - especially when they talk about it just being done for them after following the tiniest promptings of the Spirit...

Interesting

I was over at Pajiba reading the review of Nacho Libre and the comments that followed, and was therein reminded of something that has struck me more than a few times over the course of my pop-culture meanderings: the use of "abortion" as a deep, deep pejorative, as in "this abortion of a film," or "this back-alley abortion of an album."

If you asked me about the general attitude of pop-culture regarding abortion, I would say that pop-culture is almost universally supportive of a woman's right to abort the fetus in her womb. But again and again, "abortion" is used to name something that is really, really awful - film, album, article, whatever.

Interesting.

Love makes you stupid.

I am not, to say the least, mechanically inclined. I have no great love for motorized fun, and have no deep desire to instill such a love in my children. So when I saw the home-made go cart for sale by the side of the road, why didn't I just keep driving? When I heard that it needed some work done on its lawnmower engine, and new brake lines, why didn't I walk away? What was I thinking?

CCH

A Prairie Home Companion

Death comes for us all
Keillor sings as she draws near
A jowly stoic.

Sinners Welcome...

...is the title of the latest collection from Mary Karr, celebrated poet and memoirist and professor at Syracuse University (30 minutes north of the hometown), who appeared on Fresh Air a couple of days back and discussed her decision to enter the Catholic Church. A good listen.

Today in Porn, Email Edition

...well, not exactly. But I just tried to forward an email from my dad about a conversation he had with a man whose last name was Hooker. The email bounced back, caught by the spambot. I'm thinking it was the name - the rest of the email was about music. A body can imagine all sorts of difficulties arising from this sort of snag.

Next up, Charlie Brown pitches winning baseball game, Snoopy gets Red Baron...

...Trix Rabbit gets to eat Trix, Opus finds his mother, Team Rocket captures Pikachu...

Oh, I'm done. This is sad.

Saw Da Vinci

...for semi-professional reasons.

Chief reaction: Tom Hanks' face looks like warm saltwater taffy.

That chick is the blankest slate I ever done seen. Good thing, too, since Hanks and McKellan do so much blasted writing upon her. "And tip to this, little Missy...technically, the audience is not here, so you're just gonna have to listen on their behalf..."

I can't believe Ian McKellan actually said, "That's what they want you to believe."

Terrifying list

It struck me as I was driving about the other day just how many Phil Collins hits I can recall.

Two Hearts (Living in Just One Mind)
Another Day in Paradise
Invisible Touch
I Can Feel it Coming in the Air Tonight
Sussudeo
Against All Odds
Land of Confusion

Oh, Lord, the list goes on and on and on. I have no idea how this happened. (Granted, some of the songs are from Genesis, but still.) So...add your own in the comments.

Bookmark, Holmes edition

"It was a masterpiece of villainy, and he carried it out like a master...But he had not that supreme gift of the artist, the knowledge of when to stop. He wished to improve that which was already perfect...and so he ruined all."
- Sherlock Holmes, The Adventure of the Norwood Builder

That quote, recited to me by a friend in conversation, and applied to another matter entirely, is what got me finally digging into Holmes on the page, as opposed to Holmes on the screen or the radio. I grew up listening to recordings of Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce playing Holmes and Watson for a radio program sponsored by Petri Wine ("The proudest name in American wine"). And there's a fellow here in town, Folk Arts Rare Recordings, I think, with reel-to-reel recordings of all sorts of things - he also has all kinds of vinyl. For $10, he made me a tape of Sir Ralph Richardson and Sir John Gielgud as the immortal duo. But I am grateful to my friend for getting me to open the book, an edition of which sat on my brother's bedside bookshelf throughout our room-sharing childhood.

Additional petty delight: Holmes is tipped off that the alibi in The Adventure of The Abbey Grange is bogus when he notices that only one of the three wine glasses at the scene of the crime contains sediment:

"What then, do you suppose?"

"That only two glasses were used, and that the dregs of both were poured into a third glass, so as to give the false impression that three people had been here. In that way all the beeswing woudl be in the last glass, would it not? Yes, I am convinced that this is so. But if I have hit upon the true explanation of this one small phenomenon, then in an instant the case rises from the commonplace to the exceedingly remarkable, for it can only mean that Lady Brackenstall and her maid have deliberately lied to us..."

What's Frightening

That sin can, over time, dull the conscience to the point where it doesn't even feel like sin.

Every Sperm is Precious

A friend passed along the lyrics to Monty Python's quasi-classic song from their Meaning of Life...

Every sperm is useful
Every sperm is fine
God needs everybody's
Mine, and mine, and mine

Let the pagans spill theirs
O'er mountain, hill and plain
God shall strike them down for
Each sperm that's spilt in vain

In light of the Church's recent reaffirmation of its teaching in these matters, I was happy to be reminded. Also worth noting: in the same film, the Prot husband lectures his wife about how he, unlike a Catholic, could, if he so desired, head down to the druggist and order up a condom. The wife is clearly delighted at the thought of the sort of activity a condom usually signifies - but the husband never goes. He just talks about how he could.

Unusual Redux

First Son's name for Second Daughter: "Little skin bag of goodness." How he makes it sound endearing is hard to say.

Unusual

First Son has apparently absorbed a few things about marketing. He came to me last night with his first Mini-Mag: Good websites to go on (www.pokemon.com), a few good books (The Spiderwick Chronicles), a recipe (his own, for smashed-bread cinnamon rolls), an optical illusion. A lil' something for everyone, in easily digestible nuggets. But it was the cover story that really caught Dad's interest: The Mean Eye. The graphic was, of course, a mean eye. Here is the text: "This is the mean eye of the devil, staring at us with hatred. Think of other ways that life is unusual."

The whole thing is interesting, but that last sentence is killer.

A Little Slow on the Uptake

At first, I didn't get why Sky High had the soundtrack it did. One '80s hit after another: "Save it for Later," "Everybody Wants to Rule the World," "Just What I Needed," "And She Was," "Twist and Crawl," "One Thing Leads to Another," "Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want This Time," the fantabulous "Voices Carry" and the anthemic "I Melt With You." But none of them by the original artists - all covers by newcomers.

In my defense, I will note that it was only recently that I became aware of Kurt Russell's full history in cinema. I was introduced to Russell as Snake Plissken in the immortal Escape from New York. It wasn't until sometime last year that I learned he was the teenage star of such Disney fare as The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes and Now You See Him, Now You Don't.

So it is perhaps forgiveable that it took me a few minutes to realize what Disney was about with the music on Sky High. Nostalgia - the hard stuff. Giving us the star of the movies so many of us cut our teeth on, only now he's all grown up and playing the dad instead of the teenager. Hey, we're grown up now, too, and taking our kids to see silly, fun movies like Sky High, just like our parents took us to The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes! But of course, we weren't into pop music yet - we didn't get hooked until we were teenagers. So they give us '80s music. But - but, but, but - they gotta sell this stuff to the kids. They can't have their parents' classic rock - Talking Heads, The Smiths, etc. - not the straight stuff, anyway. But hey - give the songs to a bunch of youngsters, and voila - everybody's happy!

Brilliant. Tip of the hat to Disney, especially since the movie looked like good fun (I had two little ones playing couch war with me, so I missed a fair portion of the dialogue).

T-Shirt of the Day...

Another one to wear while hauling the brood around town...

(Yes, there's a lot of offensive stuff on the site. But this one is classic.)

Today in Porn, Convenience Store Edition

Well, the lad-mag FHM (For Him Magazine, Fresh Hooters Monthly, etc.) has gone and put a proper porn star on the cover. A lad-mag first - usually, they stick to starlets and models. I'm not gonna link to an image - you'll have to go down to your local 7-11 for that. If you're reading a post entitled Today in Porn, you're just gonna have to put up with the following rather distasteful joke (last chance to stop reading!): The slippery slope gets a good deal slipperier when greased with Astro-Glide.

One Pill Makes You Larger...

Without making any kind of judgement (I'll be the first to admit that I'm no expert in this matter), can I just say that this seems alarming?

Opening graf: The use of potent antipsychotic drugs to treat children and adolescents for problems like aggression and mood swings increased more than fivefold from 1993 to 2002, researchers are reporting today.

Caught Out

Over at About Last Night a few days ago, Terry took a swipe at Wyeth:

My travels began with a visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where I took in Andrew Wyeth: Memory and Magic. Wyeth is an odd case, a self-evidently gifted artist whom few art critics take seriously save as a technician. I am, for the most part, one of their skeptical number, though I do like his splendidly accomplished drybrush watercolors, a few of which are to be found in this crowded (in all senses) retrospective. I don't care at all for the large-scale paintings, which have always struck me as essentially false, all but quivering with an embarrassed romanticism poorly concealed beneath a cloak of pretended austerity. It’s the paintings that most people love, though, and I wish I could agree with them. Dr. Johnson said of Gray’s Elegy that “I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtlety and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.” I agree—but not when it comes to Wyeth.

Ouch. If you come to Casa Godsbody, this is what you'll find hanging over the fireplace, matted and framed and everything. There are a couple of reasons for it. One, I bought the print after visiting a Wyeth exhibit in Kansas City with The Wife, back when she was just The Girlfriend. It was a wondrous day. But the bigger reason is because it captures so perfectly the feeling of Upstate New York in late fall or early spring (which seems to take a fair chunk of the year). Nature in the grave, without the shroud of snow. There, I said it - it captures a feeling. "Quivering with embarrassed romanticism poorly concealed beneath a cloak of pretended austerity" - that's me. But it's also Upstate New York. Wyeth nailed it.

Ah, youth.

Who can forget their first dismembered Ken doll? I don't even know how these things got into the house - they're ancient, and we certainly didn't buy 'em, but there they are: Barbie and Ken. Only Ken doesn't seem to have any limbs, and Third Son is happily walking a pair of little plastic legs along the edge of the dresser. When he sees me seeing him, he clutches the legs to himself and says, smiling, "Scary!"

Hey, I can see my church from here...

It's not super-high-res, and the framing ain't perfect, but here is a shot of my hometown church. Just because I think it's nice.

Keillor Redux

Keillor gets the NYT's At Home With treatment, one which touches on his long love-hate relationship with the press - see That Old Picayune Moon in The Book of Guys, or bits from We Are Still Married, or this line from the profile, about Charles Schulz's early rejection:

"It was one of the great bonehead mistakes of American journalism," Mr. Keillor continues, in a voice that suggests there have been many and that he has endured the consequences of one or two himself.

Or this:

After an Anoka High School class reunion in 1987, Mr. Garrison fell in love with Ulla Skaerved, whom he had known long before as an exchange student. He spoke beautifully of their love on the radio, but his Minnesota public, loyal to Ms. Moos, was not entranced. After he married Ms. Skaerved, a local newspaper published a front page picture of the newlyweds' home, including the address and the sale price. Mr. Keillor, who calls the matter "ancient history" when a reporter brings up the matter and now insists it had nothing to do with his decision to leave St. Paul, sent an angry letter to the paper, shut down the radio show and moved to Copenhagen.

Another interesting tidbit for any would-be biographers out there: Keillor's been married three times. It sounds like he met one wife he met at an Anoka, MN high-school reunion. Another (his current wife) grew up in Anoka. But it sounds like he met her in New York. File under Embracing/Rejection of Hometown Life.

"Without the cilice, I find my life as an American consumer unbearably comfortable."

An Opus Dei numerary gets his two cents in with the NYT. Do go read.

Movie Chat

"Find hungry samurai."

- Grandpa, answering the problem of how to get samurai to fight for nothing more than rice, in The Seven Samurai.

So We Got Married...

And The Big Boss at the day job asked The Wife and me (and a whole bunch of other folks) to write something about the wedding. Hoo!