Pity Will Smith...

...trapped at the most terrifying Last Supper ever. Thanks to Michael for the link.

By the by, there's tons of brilliant stuff over there at Gallery of the Absurd, but they do work blue when they've a mind to. Consider yourself forewarned.

Bookmark, Benedict Edition

From today's reading in Benedictus:

"Human beings are such that they cannot stand the person who is wholly good, truly upright, truly loving, the person who does evil to no one. It seems that in this world only momentarily is trust met with trust, justice with justice, love with love. The person who exemplifies all these virtues quickly becomes insupportable to others. People will crucify anyone who is really and fully human. Such is man. And such am I - that is the terrifying insight that comes to me from the crucified Christ. Along with this insight, however, goes another: Man is the being who is capable of expressing God himself. Man is so made that God can enter into union with him. The human person, who seems at first sight to be a kind of unfortunate monster produced by evolution, at the same time represents the highest possibility the created order can attain."

Elsewhere

The Lion and the Cardinal has a new piece, as well as the miniature that inspired it.

Today in Worship

The Lawyer passes along a bit from Galley Slaves:

"According to Breitbart.com, certain parishes under the Church of England will now be able to perform services to the tune of U2 songs 'in an effort to boost congregations.' Two of the songs to be used are 'Mysterious Ways' and 'Beautiful Day.'

As some of you know, I've listened to U2 since I was about 14. But if I were sitting in a church and suddenly I was told to please rise and sing the communion hymn, 'Bullet the Blue Sky,' I think I would have to flee.

Sadly, this sort of gimmick is not new. When I was in Catholic high school, someone conned our teachers and the local priest into playing Mr. Mister's 'Kyrie' during the consecration."

Catholics: leading the way in goofy attempts to appeal to The Youth of Today since 1970. Because, you know, I just don't get to hear pop music unless I go to church.

Bookmark

This is from the 1944 book Secrets of the Saints by Henri Gheon. After a period of initial resistance, he comes 'round to the appeal of the Little Flower, but that doesn't mean he drops his critical faculties with regard to her shrine...(Go on, read the whole thing. If you had something better to do, you wouldn't be here in the first place...)

"I went at last to Lisieux, the Story of a Soul under my arm, resolved to see everything, and to dare everything - even the chapel of her shrine...On entering one strives hard to find some attraction in it. Were it plainer, it would not be half bad; there is a crushing excess of ornament, as useless as it is bad, yet this might be overlooked. But on turning to the right to venerate the holy relics, we are at once up against the masterpiece of hideousness and stupidity that has the high honor of sheltering them. The pseudo-renaissance cupola and its worthless stained-glass windows are the least of the absurdities. The shrine itself is showy, clumsy, quite without beauty: let that, too, pass. And I am not particularly offended by the brocade and velvet with which the recumbent image of the saint is dressed up in its gold and crystal cage...What I canot tolerate are the shrine's supernatural guardians, two gigantic angels and a child musician: they are carved so flabbily in a marble so white and soft that they seem to melt like sugar when you look at them...To complete the crime, the sculptor (doubtless an 'eminent' one) has set out on the steps several things like marble-sugar in the form of scattered roses and - to crown the horror - from a dense oily cloud there rises a ponderous bronze cross...The uniform spirit of the repository, pretentiousnes, jingling poeticalness, and pious adulation give a confusing unity to the whole thing...And remember that this gilding will never be dulled, this stucco never fade, this marble never lose its shiny surface - for the lighting of candles is forbidden: bulbs of electric light have superseded them. We are among the new rich, whose drawing-room furniture has cost too much not to be kept like new.

"It would be laughable, if one could find the heart to laugh. It makes the visitor ashamed of his country and of his century, ashamed that he lingers among such enormities. He feels the spirit of the image-breakers rising within him. He is sorry for Teresa and asks her forgiveness for these outrages..."

The poor man tries to pull back from his own outrage: "Be humble about your likes and dislikes, humble yourself even to the extent of accepting ugliness...But reason persists: why does God allow it? Why does Teresa allow it? Why has God let the devil have this triumph, that this holy place should be in the front rank of monstrosities of Catholic ecclesiastical art in the twentieth century? Does the soul no longer inform the body, and the spirit the flesh?"

He is not blinded by the horror, mind you: "Above all, there is the devotion, the true devotion, of the humble folk who fill and transfigure the chapel at every hour of the day...Yet the surrender we are longing to make must wait for one more argument: Was all this stuff really necessary? Could we not have done without it?

"No. Probably we could not. Those of us who are put off by it are only a small minority. Teresa was given to her own times; humanly speaking, and in her earthly aspect she was made a standard for them, and the devotion she excites has taken the external form which it required...We need not try to explain it away, for it does no wrong to Teresa...God bequeathed it to Teresa - and she uses it.

"I do not mean to say that we have the saints we deserve; we never deserve the saints we have. But we are given the saints whose outward appearance is most likely to attract us...Jesus Christ did not die for artists and men of good taste alone: they can go to Chartres and some of them will come back converted. The crowds that descend on Lisieux and carry away its trash as well as its graces to the ends of the earth find themselves quite at home...As they pray they find the real Teresa underneath the sugar roses and the cheesy clouds, behind the platitudes and pet-names that take all the salt of her most heroic story: Teresa, the ascetic of the wasted body and bruised heart and unbending will whose sacrifice was ceaseless, who lived on and died from a love that was all pain. That is what lay behind her smile; i have read the Story of a Soul again, and it is beyond question. Some jam must be mixed with the powder if the multitude is to take so bitter a medicine. She mixed a little herself..."

Immaculate Direction Bids Farewell

Cubeland Mystic heads off to the Grey Havens:

"I started the Immaculate Direction almost a year ago to dialogue about materialism and its impact on our Catholic faith and culture. The dominant culture is an unavoidable reality. All of us, to some degree, make compromises with it in order to thrive in it. These may be reluctant compromises, but they are compromises nonetheless. The best way in my opinion to combat an aggressively materialist culture is to be an active creator rather than a passive consumer. Through our own creative energy we mirror our creator. While we create, if our intention is directed toward God, I believe the fruit of that effort is holy. Hence this blog’s subtitle, a journey toward a sacramental life...

This will be my last post. I won’t say forever, but for quite awhile...However, I will share something that I’ve been reluctant to reveal before. I wish to seriously pursue writing fiction. It’s been in the back of my mind for over twenty years. Perhaps it will lead to something someday, nevertheless writing is how I will engage the dominant culture."

Godspeed, CM. In other news, the ranks of my blogroll do seem to be thinning of late. The Godsbody curse?

To quote the taxi from Who Framed Roger Rabbit?...

...Sister Mary Francis! Barb is busy:

"I have so many things I am dying to blog about (...how considering the competition, Apocalypto should have gotten an Oscar nom ...why we are going to see a lot more movies like The Fountain which is an exhausting prospect...the difference between Last King of Scotland and Hotel Rwanda... how the Oscars are grimly and trenchantly embracing their own future irrelevance... Why The Nativity will not undo The Passion effect in Hollywood... Origin Entertainment, the production entity at which I am a partner...The 13th Day - the movie on Fatima I worked on in Australia...What I saw in Australia living in Asiatown, working with Brits and Irishmen on a fiolm shot in Portugal...My movie The Work getting shot this fall with a cool director who it probably isn't up to me to name here... My thoughts on the script Myriam which I worked on as the co-writer for many months... the Jane Austen adaptation I am working on now and how smug I am about the cool and clever way it is structured - think chukkers not acts - but I say , nothing, nothing!...The thrilling prospect of starting work adapting A Severe Mercy for the screen - just acquired for me by Origin.... My upcoming pilgrimage to Israel, why, how and with whom...) but I have no time to blog!"

Sounds like somebody's getting their calls answered these days...

Dept. of License Plates

[Heart]MYMILF

It'd be downright sweet, possibly a pledge of marital affection, except, well...

Memento Mori

Jody Bottum prepares to waltz with the Reaper (or at least, talk about it):

"For several years now, in a slow, circuitous way, I’ve been thinking about death–not dying, so much, as the role that death plays in various forms of human thought. Ethics, art, politics, psychology, metaphysics–what difference does the knowledge that we can die make? What difference does the knowledge that we will die make?

So, for example, in accounting for human behavior, game theory makes much of the risk of death in various activities. But how are actual human behaviors influenced not just by the deadly risks of certain activities but also by the inescapable human knowledge that, regardless of all activities, death will come anyway? And how are we influenced by the knowledge that all those around us can and will die? Slowly, as I’ve worked on these topics, I’ve come to the understanding that the death of others, more than the death of ourselves, remains the supressed premise in huge swaths of human thought."

Poetry Corner, Unborn Edition

This is by Gwendolyn Brooks, who wrote the famous "We real cool.

The Mother

Abortions will not let you forget.
You remember the children you got that you did not get,
The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,
The singers and workers that never handled the air.
You will never neglect or beat
Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.
You will never wind up the sucking-thumb
Or scuttle off ghosts that come.
You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,
Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.

I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed
children.
I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches,
and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.
Though why should I whine,
Whine that the crime was other than mine?--
Since anyhow you are dead.
Or rather, or instead,
You were never made.
But that too, I am afraid,
Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?
You were born, you had body, you died.
It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.

Believe me, I loved you all.
Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you
All.

The family thing.

Apparently, my uncle wrote the liner notes for the Neko Case live CD.

Fantastic

A friend writes:

"Today, I officially win the prize for best "large family" comment. I was sitting outside [an ice cream parlor],
all the kids lined up in a row....an older gentleman passed by, looked at the kids, looked at me, smiled and said, I kid you not, 'You must be fantastic.' And yes, I am pretty sure he meant what it sounds like. I still cannot stop laughing."

Today in Porn, Technology Edition, with a special nod to the NYT's article on Post-Abortion Syndrome

Thanks to Amy, I know that Annie has taken on this piece, the slant of which was enough to start me talking about just leaving the NYT alone. But it's so hard to leave it alone, especially when it serves up steamy fare such as this. Let the fun begin!

In Raw World of Sex Movies, High Definition Could Be a View Too Real

The XXX industry has gotten too graphic, even for its own tastes.

Pornography has long helped drive the adoption of new technology, from the printing press to the videocassette. Now pornographic movie studios are staying ahead of the curve by releasing high-definition DVDs.

They have discovered that the technology is sometimes not so sexy. The high-definition format is accentuating imperfections in the actors — from a little extra cellulite on a leg to wrinkles around the eyes...

[Ah, yes. The eyes. The measure of a great porn star. The eyes, they must be perfect. Kidding. Age kills.]

Producers are taking steps to hide the imperfections. Some shots are lit differently, while some actors simply are not shot at certain angles, or are getting cosmetic surgery, or seeking expert grooming.

[Wanted: expert groomer. An exciting career in expert grooming could be waiting for you at the Vivid School for Beauty-making!]

“The biggest problem is razor burn,” said Stormy Daniels, an actress, writer and director.

[Keep that line - if not necessarily that image - in mind.]

Ms. Daniels is also a skeptic. “I’m not 100 percent sure why anyone would want to see their porn in HD,” she said.

[Thank you, Ms. Daniels. You'll be contradicted later in the piece, but I'm pretty sure you're right on this one.]

The technology’s advocates counter that high definition, by making things clearer and crisper, lets viewers feel as close to the action as possible.

[Yeep!]

“It puts you in the room,” said the director known as Robby D., whose films include “Sexual Freak.”

[Because that's where you want to be. In the room. Not on your couch.]

Despite the challenges, pornographers — who distributed some 7,000 new movies on DVD last year and sold discs worth $3.6 billion in the United States — are rapidly moving to high-definition...The studios said their experience using the technology gives them an advantage in understanding how to cope with the mixed blessing of hypercrisp images. Their techniques include using postproduction tools that let them digitally soften the actors’ skin tone.

[The airbrush makes its way off the page and onto celluloid.]

“It takes away the blemishes and the pits and harshness and makes it look like they have baby skin,” said the director known as Joone, who made “Pirates,” one of the industry’s top-selling videos. It will be available this month in high-definition.

[Easy on the baby-skin references, pal. Although, to be fair, I'm grateful he didn't use the classic "smooth as a baby's bottom."]

Joone does not use a last name, but he does use a number of techniques to keep his films blemish-free. They include giving out lifestyle tips.

“I tell the girls to work out more, cut down on the carbs, hit the treadmill,” he said.

["A healthy lifestyle is crucial to your success in the world of pornographic film production! Plenty of vegetables and fruit, plenty of sleep, regular exercise, and great heaping mounds of strawberry cocaine are all essential aspects of keeping fit the happy, healthy, porn-star way!"]

Within the industry, the issue seems to have created a difference in perspective that cuts roughly along gender lines. Some male actors have begun using makeup to mitigate wrinkles or facial flaws, but generally they, and the male directors, are less worried about high-definition’s glare and more enamored of the technology.

Ms. Daniels said that attitude was just so typical of men.

“Men are all about outdoing each other, being up with the times, being cool, having the latest technology,” she said. “They’re willing to sacrifice our vanity and imperfections to beat each other” to high-definition, she said.

[They're willing to sacrifice a whole lot more than your vanity, lady.]

Other female actors say they generally like working with high-definition — except for the cosmetic-surgery part.

Jesse Jane, one of the industry’s biggest stars, plans to go under the knife next month to deal with one side effect of high-definition. The images are so clear that Ms. Jane’s breast implants, from an operation six years ago, can be seen bulging oddly on screen.

“I’m having my breasts redone because of HD,” she said.

The stretch marks on Ms. Jane from seven years ago when she gave birth to her son are also more apparent. But she deals with those blemishes in a simpler way: by liberal use of tanning spray.

[Airbrush in a can!]

Still, Ms. Jane likes the technology, as does her close friend Kirsten Price, 25, who appeared in “Manhunters” and “Just Like That.”

“HD is great because people want to see how people really look,” Ms. Price said. “People just want to see what’s real.”

[What's real, as mentioned earlier in the piece: blemishes, pits, and harshness. Stretch marks. Odd bulges. Razor burns. Silly me; I always thought porn was about indulging a fantasy. Turns about it's all about what's real.]

Ms. Price is allowing them to do so, mostly. She had laser treatments to diminish tiny purple veins on her thighs that weren’t visible to viewers before.

[Actually, it turns out that porn is all about what's realer than real! Read on!]

“You can see things you cannot see with the naked eye.

[See?]

You see skin blemishes; you see cottage cheese,” said Robbie D. “But some cellulite is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s kind of sexy.”

[This is known as Making a Virtue of Necessity.]

The technology makes the experience more intimate, he said. “People look to adult movies for personal contact, and yet they’re still not getting it. HD lets them see a little bit more of the girl.”

[Yes, because seeing more of the girl will bring you that much closer to actually getting personal contact. Or not. But do people really look to adult movies for personal contact? Really? Isn't the whole point of watching sex onscreen to AVOID personal contact, to avoid having to deal with the messy, complicated personhood of your (onscreen) paramour? To be able to treat her, or see her treated, as a vehicle for sexual gratification, and little else? Maybe I'm just getting old...]

That’s not necessarily good, said Savanna Samson, an actress who last December directed her first movie, “Any Way You Want Me.” During a scene in which she played a desperate housewife, she ran into a problem: the high-definition camera revealed she had a tiny ill-placed pimple.

“We kept stopping and trying to hide it. We put on makeup and powder, but there was no way,” Ms. Samson said. Finally, they tried another approach: “We just changed positions,” she said.

[I've got nothing to add here.]

And the horse you rode in on.

A friend passed this one along...

Zoo is "a poetic film about a forbidden subject, a perfect marriage between a cool and contemplative director and potentially incendiary subject matter: sex between men and animals. Not graphic in the least, this strange and strangely beautiful film combines audio interviews.. with elegiac visual re-creations intended to conjure up the mood and spirit of situations. The director himself puts it best: 'I aestheticized the sleaze right out of it.'" Is that like making a silk purse out of a sow's ear?

And oh, what a beautiful capper on this one: "In the end, Devor ended up agreeing with the Roman writer Terence, who said 'I consider nothing human alien to me.'" Horses, on the other hand...

Note to the woman who flipped off my children during the prayer vigil to end abortion yesterday afternoon

I dunno. Maybe you think that since I am one of Those People, the kind who drag their kids into anti-abortion events, I deserve to have my children flipped off. But it's not like I'm subjecting them to graphic images of the dismembered unborn - this wasn't that sort of event. And it's not even like I'm telling them about exactly what abortion is. I'm all for preserving childhood innocence on points like this. First Son learned about it elsewhere. The rest were there praying for women with babies in their tummies who were in trouble, not sure what to do, and in need of help. And it's not as if my kids were alone amid a crowd of their elders - they were there with friends, about twenty kids in all. Next time, please save the bird for the grownups.

Dept. of Rejected New Yorker Cartoons...

...even though they are guilty of plenty of obvious bits like this one:

Tweener girl - say, 11 - talking to 7-year-old sister: "You're so lucky. You won't even have to THINK about having work done for, what, another two years?"

"What are YOU doing about it?"

Well, it started here, got picked up here, and has now made its way here:

When [Archbishop Wuerl] took questions, a woman asked how be would respond to Catholic politicians who support legal abortion.
His response was "teach."
"That is what Jesus did," he said. "Did everyone accept that teaching? No. ... But he didn't stop teaching. We are in this for the long haul."
He noted that he sometimes gets letters from Catholics demanding to know what he will do about such situations.
His temptation, he said, was to reply with, "What are YOU doing about it? How is your voice heard?"

A dangerous question to pose rhetorically, that. If he actually asked it, he might find that the letter writers are doing a great deal. But there are things that he can do as a bishop that they cannot do as laypeople - is it ridiculous for them to ask him to do what his office grants him the unique power to do? (And what is that? Well, First Things notes that before he was pope, Ratzinger, then head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, wrote that when all pastoral efforts of persuasion failed, it would be appropriate to advise those who publicly and persistently reject the Church’s teaching that they should refrain from Communion and, if they still refused to do so, to deny them Communion.)

As I understand it, such a thing would be done not out of punishment, but because, in their obstinate and public rejection of Church teaching, they had removed themselves from the communion that Communion signifies.

It is of course worth noting that such an action is allowed as a last resort, only after all pastoral efforts at persuasion have failed. This is, I suspect, what Wuerl is getting at when he talks about teaching. (Though I think it is also worth noting that Jesus, while he didn't stop teaching, did suggest that there would be some consequence for those who refused to hear.)

A great place to begin the teaching - not that anyone asked - suggested by my father: address the notion, implicitly put forth by many Catholic pro-choice politicians, that belief in the personhood of the unborn is a religious belief, and therefore, something we may not impose upon our fellow man. The Church refers to abortion as a violation of human rights - it doesn't turn to religious language.

Day of Penance

I cannot say with any certainty that there is nothing to the stereotype of the religious busybody, the person so dissatisfied with his own life that he feels compelled to meddle in the affairs of others, all the while calling it the will of God. Maybe there really are such people out there. But speaking for myself, I would very much just as soon not meddle in the affairs of others. Getting out to an abortion clinic to say a rosary for the end of abortion is a pain in my neck. It's time I would rather spend doing something else. I am a pretty selfish person; I like to spend my time with people I like doing things I like to do. Giving public witness against so charged a practice as abortion is not one of those things.

But there is the matter of Jesus, isn't there? Jesus telling me that my neighbor is not simply the person next to me, but every person. Jesus telling me that I have to love my neighbor as myself, that whatever I do to one of these least ones, I do to Him. Jesus telling me that His love extends to everyone, even persons residing in the womb, even persons who support killing persons residing in the womb, and that if I'm going to call myself Christian, I have to try to emulate that love, make that love my own.

"In all the dioceses of the United States of America, January 22...shall be observed as a particular day of penance for violations to the dignity of the human person committed through acts of abortion..."
- General Instruction of the Roman Missal

Ogden Nashing of Teeth...

Somebody stop me before I rhyme again...

The current pope has written lovely things about the Mass said ad orientem

But he wasn't the pope when he wrote them, so there remains considerable discussion as to exactly how much weight those lovely things should be given - in other words, how much he meant 'em.

As others have noted, among the crowd that delights in singing the folksy strains of "People Look East,"

There are not a few who, if you mention that you think it makes a certain degree of liturgical sense for the priest to face in the same direction as the people when he is presenting their collective prayers to God, will look at you as if you have just sprouted horns and a tail and gotten a tattoo that depicts the mark of the Beast.

And now the churchy world is buzzing with talk of Benedict's proprio giving rise to a motu,

Just so that people who, for some reason not apparently understood by a fair portion of the heirarchy, have a particular fondness for the Mass according to the Rite of the Missal of 1962 will have some place that isn't inside of a crypt or three dozen miles from the nearest town to go to.

And my friend says it's great, in tones that are anything but gliberal,

Because he's all in favor of people being allowed, as far as it is humanly possible, to worship in the way that they want to worship, and he says that he feels this way not because he's a fan of this or that Rite, but because he's a true and proper liberal.

I'm Afraid I've Caught Poetry

Happens to the best of us.

I Eat Like A God

It has become something of a tradition among the women of our little community that, when one is in need - sick, stressed, newly delivered of a child, etc. - the others will chip in and buy her a Honeybaked ham. This is a great blessing. I love the ham, but even more, I love the black bean soup The Wife makes from the bone after the ham is gone. She takes her recipe from Cook's Illustrated:

Black Bean Soup

Best made a day ahead of serving so that flavors can meld in the fridge. Will hold for three days in the fridge. Although hamhock will hold probably just a tablespoon or two of meat, it's worth taking the time to remove this meat and adding it back into the soup. For a different effect, garnish with shredded Monterey Jack cheese.

Serves 6.

Beans

1 pound (2 and 1/4 cups) dried black beans, rinsed and picked over
1 smoked ham hock
1 medium green bell pepper, stemmed, seeded, and quartered
1 medium onion, minced
6 medium garlic cloves, minced
2 bay leaves
1 and 1/2 t salt

Sofrito

2 T olive oil
1 medium onion, minced
1 small red bell pepper, stemmed, seeded, and minced
3/4 t salt
8 medium cloves garlic, minced
2 t dried oregano
1 T ground cumin

Finishing the soup

2 T cornstarch
1 T lime juice
1/4 c sour cream
1/4 c roughly chopped fresh cilantro leaves
1/2 small red onion, minced
Hot red pepper sauce (optional)

1. For the beans: Place the beans, ham hock, green pepper and 13 cups of water in a large stock pot. Bring to a boil over medium heat, reduce to low, and skim surface as scum rises. Stir in onion, garlic, bay leaves, and salt. Bring back to a simmer. Cook, partially covered, until beans are tender, but not splitting (taste several, as they cook unevenly), about two hours. Remove ham hock from pot, cut meat into bit sized pieces, discard bone, fat, and skin. Stir meat back into pot of beans.

2. For the sofrito: Meanwhile, heat the oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add the onion, red pepper, and salt, and saute until the vegetables soften, 8 to 10 minutes. Add garlic, oregano, and cumin, saute until fragrant, one minute longer.

3. To finish the soup: scoop 1 1/2 cups of beans and two cups of cooking liquid into the pan with the sofrito. Mash the beans with a potato masher or fork until smooth. Simmer, uncovered, over medium heat, until the liquid is reduced and thickened, about five minutes. Return the sofrito mixture to the bean pot. Simmer, uncovered, until the flavors meld, about 15 minutes.

4. Blend cornstarch and two tablespoons cold water together in a small bowl to form a paste. Stir the paste into the soup, and simmer until thickened, about five minutes. (Soup can be refrigerated in air tight container for about three days. Bring the soup to a simmer over low heat.) To serve, remove and discard the green pepper and bay leaves. Stir in the lime juice and adjust the seasonings. Ladle the soup into individual bowls, and garnish each bowl with a spoonful of sour cream, a generous sprinkling of cilantro, and some red onion. Serve immediately, passing hot red pepper sauce at the table if desired.

The Last Thing On My Mind

Saw one of these for the first time yesterday. Nothing like a little novelty to add spice to your everyday reminders of mortality. The glass sides are a creative touch. Memento mori, indeed.

Reality TV for Christian America

Four words: American Martyr: NBC Thursdays

The possibilities are mind-boggling. The idea is from commentor Ernesto Pinamonti.

Today in Wine

Thanks to the extraordinary generosity of a friend; a conversational reference to a study which apparently showed that women who are (subconsciously) seeking long-term mates choose men with feminine facial features (hello!), while women who are seeking short-term mates choose men with masculine facial features (oooh, tough guy/bad boy); and my own sad little sense of humor's imagining how such information could serve a man such as myself attempting to pick up some girl in a bar; I can now say that I have had the honor of making a 1997 Domaine Romanee-Conti Grands Echezeaux come out of someone's nose.

The news is sad, and getting sadder...

First, our fabulous minivan seems to have died of a bad transmission. That's bad enough. But what's much, much worse is the fact that The Wife never let me put silver flames along the sides before it went.

When CL came to town...

I met this man and this man and this man and this man and this man and this man and this man and a great many other men and women. It was a delightful and memorable evening, and I think I offended only about half of them. Many thanks to CL member Santiago Ramos for the kind invitation!

Yesterday's Theology of the Body News Today!

Second Spring interviews Michael Waldstein on the new translation of the theology-of-the-body series:

First up, "It turns out that Cardinal Wojtyla wrote the theology of the body in Polish before his election in 1978." Groovy!

Second, Waldstein grants that TOB brings something new to the table: "In his preface to the new translation, Cardinal Schönborn singles out three striking theses that are relatively new in Catholic magisterial teaching. One, the image of God is found in man and woman above all in the communion of love between them, which reflects the communion of love between the persons of the Trinity. Two, in God's design, the spousal bodily union of man and woman is the original effective sign through which holiness entered the world. Three, this sign of marriage 'in the beginning' is thus the foundation of the whole sacramental order."

But he rejects the notion that TOB is something altogether new in the arena of Catholics and sex:

"I am not sure though whether 'revolutionary' is quite the right word, because John Paul II's roots in the tradition are so deep and he stands in such substantial continuity with it. In the introduction that I wrote for the new translation I show that John Paul II is deeply rooted in St. John of the Cross, in particular in the Mystical Doctor's spousal understanding of Christian life. On his deathbed, when his brothers prayed the traditional prayers for the dead, St. John of the Cross waved them off and asked them to read the Song of Songs.

Of course there are many tributaries to John Paul II's vision of sexuality, but at the very heart of his vision, John Paul II unfolds the implicit theology of marriage in St. John of the Cross. When Karol Wojtyla was 21, before he entered the seminary, he learned Spanish to read St. John of the Cross in the original, and seven years later he wrote his dissertation under Garrigou-Lagrange about his favorite poet and theologian.

In comparison with much theological writing about marriage in the Catholic tradition, which approached marriage often from the point of view of law – to help confessors and those who had to judge marriage cases – John Paul II's approach is decidedly 'personalistic' and focused on the actual experience of love. He himself helped to form this fresh vision of love during Vatican II and it is the predominant form of his thinking in the theology of the body."

Third, he sings the body erotic: "The human body with the sexual language created by God has a deep kinship with the person. The sentient body is created for the person as an expression of personal love. In fact, the body is immediately and directly personal, because the person 'is a body.' A great Thomist, Charles De Koninck, came up with a variation on Descartes' famous statement: 'Sedeo ergo sum, I sit therefore I am.' This is much in the spirit of John Paul II. It was important to get the passages about the relation between the person and the body absolutely clear."

And finally, a bit of news that will delight some who have longed to see TOB subjected to the rigor of the academy:

"At the other end of the spectrum, in the academic world, the theology of the body has not been studied much. My Introduction is an attempt to open up the text a bit for academic study. In the theology of the body John Paul II was really wrestling with the fundamental questions of our age, the question of progress, of the nature of science, of technology and its good as well as dangers, etc. It is a powerful contribution to the debate about those questions and deserves a hearing."

Percy Might've Raised a Glass...

...to Rod Bennett, who stumbled upon It's a Wonderful Life utterly free of the baggage that has rendered it all but impossible to see as it really is, and who was astonished:

"I was, as you may have noticed, rather badly shaken up by this old film that everyone else seems to find so mild and safe. I had no way of knowing, in my simplicity, that It's A Wonderful Life is old-fashioned, sentimental, and preaches an easy, cheap optimism. It seemed to me a rather horrifyingly costly optimism: take up your cross—for whoever clings to his life will lose it, but whoever lays down his life will save it unto life eternal...I had watched It's A Wonderful Life with the wide eyes and wide open heart so characteristic of the completely ignorant. But surely there is something very strange about a movie that sounds like baby talk to one person and feels like a punch in the nose to another."

Percy was fond of such moments, when the meaning of things was restored to them. From there, Bennett moves on to a more general consideration of Frank Capra, and it's an interesting read:

"Far from finishing in that 'happy-ending-land' of Mom and God and Norman Rockwell that he has been supposed to inhabit so blithely, Capra actually begins there. That world of family and democracy and human dignity is his hypothesis. Can it be believed? It is certainly warming and attractive but is it sound? Does it correspond to reality? We want to know. We need to know before we can be asked to stick our necks out for it. And so, faithful to his training, Capra the Chemist begins dispassionately and systematically turning up the Bunsen-burners of doubt, despair, and tragedy. He turns them up until that hypothesis is boiling in a beaker of betrayal and disillusionment so hot that the test simply cannot fail to uncover whether this 'Capra-corn' he grew up believing can actually stand as a viable picture of the way things really are—or whether it will be revealed to have been, as Copernicus revealed the Ptolomeic cosmology to have been, nothing but a comforting fantasy...This hero has courted the worst of the chaotic forces that hammer our dreams into the ground...The hero's life, dedicated to Capra's twin pillars of faith and human dignity, is to be tested in the chemist's furnace because we need to know the truth—we need to know whether that life or any life so conceived and so dedicated can long endure."

And the capper:

"This is why Frank Capra, contrary to popular opinion, is one of the most challenging of all filmmakers and in some ways the most disturbing. Most 'serious films'—the 'hard-hitting' 'uncompromising' films—ask us only to accept, for example, that poverty is bad, relationships are hard, that politics is corrupt. In short, their 'challenge' consists precisely in asking us to accept ideas that we already accept anyway, even if we struggle to know just what to do about them. In these comedies, Capra asks us to accept that the old-fashioned American ideals are still good, that David really can whip Goliath, that our prayers do not go unheard, that the meek shall inherit the earth. In other words, he asks us to accept things about which we have grave, grave doubts. And he is uncompromising in his asking: he doesn't ask us to accept these propositions as nice or inspirational or comforting or helpful—he asks us to accept them as true. That, my friend, is a challenging filmmaker. That is serious, avant-garde cinema, if you will."

Well, now.

Flannery O'Connor Onscreen

Well, not exactly. But dayum - the trailer for Black Snake Moan looks a little like something out of O'Connor's world. Right 'round the time when Samuel L. Jackson says to the sex addict he's got chained up in his house, "The Lord put you in my path, and I aim to cure you of your wickedness." Oh, my. The interesting thing is, it doesn't look like the film is out to portray him as a monster. We'll see.

(The trailer is not without its sensual elements - lots of Christina Ricci in her underwear. Viewer discretion is advised.)

Safety First?

Greg Wolfe over at Image dug up a pamphlet from the middle of last century by Gerald Vann, OP, entitled Modern Culture and Christian Renewal. He ran it as an edtiorial statement. This is a taste; I think it worth reading:

"...One might suppose that Our Lord had said he had come not that we might have life but that we might have safety. And therefore prudence has come to mean, quite simply, caution, the caution necessary to avoid all danger and ensure complete safety. To such an extent has the greatest of the cardinal virtues come down in the world! Prudence, phronesis, does not mean caution; it means practical wisdom, the ability to make wise judgment about practical matters. And sometimes wisdom will require us to be cautious, but sometimes it will require us to take risks.

The tragic effect of an attitude lacking in practical wisdom is that the role of prudence in relation to art is seen simply as an attempt to prevent artists from doing anything that might be thought dangerous to morals and, if they cannot be prevented, to ban them. Moreover the danger will be seen as lying exclusively in the content of a book or film or painting (e.g. it may be thought erotically stimulating, or may seem to argue in favor of the morality of suicide or divorce) and not at all in its aesthetic quality...

Again and again a great book or film or painting will be denounced as immoral, while the mawkish, the moronic, the aesthetically meretricious will be extolled because its message is regarded as edifying or at least safe. In the end those who are docile to this sort of guidance acquire an affinity not with what is good and real but what is bad and false...Grace builds on and in nature; it is no service to religion, and no part of prudence, to turn potentially mature human beings into morons, and we cannot claim to serve and worship truth if we acquiesce in or encourage the distortion or falsification of truth..."

Why we love The Sopranos...

...or at least, one or two of the reasons...

What is writ large in the show: a world in which, despite all the protestations and external signs about the importance of family and honor and tradition, money is the ultimate virtue. Money is what makes you valued. Money is how you move up in the ranks. Money is how you obtain forgiveness. Money is what moves you.

Also, a world in which you designate some as your own and simply regard as everyone else as other and inconsequential, to the point where you can kill them without a second thought. Also, the dangers of such a world - sooner or later, it often ends up that the only one within that circle of your own is yourself.

Today in Porn, Technology Edition Redux

While we're at it, we're waiting for the day when the iPhone 2.0 lets you "write, cast, shoot, edit, market, and distribute your very own porn film. All in the palm of your hand."

Today in Porn, Technology Edition

A friend passed this one along - will porn do to Blu-Ray what it did to Betamax?

Adventures in Branding

I don't know where my son got the plastic rosary with the black Hail Marys and the red Our Fathers. I do know that his poor father saw it and immediately thought, "Hey, it's the Apple U2 rosary!" Sigh.

Lyric written in high school, remembered, for no apparent reason, this evening.

Fish gotta swim
Birds gotta fly
I've got to love you
But I don't know why

Possible song title, thought of in early middle age:

It Ain't Natural (But It's My Nature)

UPDATE: Apparently, this is very nearly a lyric from Showboat, which I can't ever remember hearing or seeing. Boy, do I feel silly.

I know, I know...

...Nobody links to the Onion. But this is a classic from O, the Onion Style Magazine

While we're on the subject of Disney and politics...

I've always been struck by Pongo's line about Purdy's pregnancy in 101 Dalmatians. Pregnant Purdy has found out that Cruella wants her puppies after they're born, and laments that while she was once so happy, now she wishes she wasn't having the puppies at all. Pongo comes in on the narration: "Of course, she did have them. She had no choice."

Pretty cutting edge for 1961.

Bookmark

A friend passed this along:

"How good one feels when one is full -- how satisfied with ourselves and with the world! People who have tried it tell me that a clear conscience makes you very happy and contented; but a full stomach does the business quite as well, and is cheaper, and more easily obtained. One feels so forgiving and generous after a substantial and well-digested meal -- so noble-minded, so kindly hearted. We are but the veriest, sorriest slaves of our stomach. Reach not after morality and righteousness, my friends; watch vigilantly your stomach, and diet it with care and judgment. Then virtue and contentment will come and reign within your heart, unsought by any effort of your own; and you will be a good citizen, a loving husband, a tender father -- a noble, pious man."

- Three Men in a Boat

None dare call it burnout...

...okay, maybe some dare call it that.

But that aside - we know that Disney did a number of Hans Christian Andersen when it turned both The Little Mermaid and The Steadfast Tin Soldier (in Fantasia 2000) from tales of heroic self-sacrifice (and in the latter case, enduring love - the hearts that survive the flames) into feel-good affirmations of the every-little-thing's-gonna-be-all-right variety. (Because, you know, what poor Mr. Andersen didn't get was that kids can't handle anything more complicated.) What I'm wondering is, does anybody know if the House of Mouse reworked any other source material for its movies? Pinnochio? Bambi?

Also of interest: it was recently suggested to us that in Dumbo, Disney was getting into it on race, and not just with the dialect-heavy crows ("But I be done seen about everything when I see an elephant fly!"). Dumbo is ostracized because he has exceptionally large ears, while the other elephants have small ears. Do they shun him simply because he's different, or is it because only African elephants have such large ears? Was Disney commenting on prejudices against racial mixing, way back in 1941?

Boys

First Son playing a game for the recently ambulatory Second Daughter, letting her chase the red dot of a laser pointer around the house. In his delight at her dogged determination to follow wherever the dot led, he mused, laughing, "You could lead her right off a cliff."

Sweet child.

The Family Thing

Uncle-in-Law is a fine (as in professional-type) photographer, and recently scored a gallery showing in Hudson, New York (Hudson being the new Croton-on-Hudson). One of his photographs serves as the welcoming image.

Exchange

First Daughter: Why are you down here in the yard, Dad?

Me: I'm praying and trying to collect myself so that I don't lose my temper again. I don't like to lose my temper. It's a sin.

First Daughter: Like a fish getting out of your hands. It's slippery.

Smart girl.

Exchange

Brother in Law: There ought to be a name for these years, when you've got little kids and you don't do a lot of things without little kids in tow. (I'm paraphrasing here.)

Me: I call 'em the Left Arm Years. I do most things with a child in my left arm now, and I have done for nearly a decade. Teeth brushing, dishes, phone conversations, bomb defusing, Shakespearean soliloquies...

Sigh.

So the wife spots an online ad for the show Gay, Straight, or Taken over my shoulder, and, thanks to a trick of the font and her deeply repressed feelings about her spouse, asked, "Gay, Straight, or Broken? What's that?"

The Oranges of January...

...are really good. And they remind us that it's January - time for wishful resolutions. Let's try morning prayer (got this for Christmas) and finishing a rather short little novel I started a while back. Mmm - oranges.

On the topic of novels - Debra Murphy over at Idylls Press has a collection of articles on the subject of Catholics and fiction. This one caught my eye (such a lovely title):

"Catholic writers, if they were to gain a cultural niche, needed to reformulate the traditional 'sacramental' vision as a supernaturalism that could accommodate 'really, really dark' naturalist truths. In their evolution of a 'mystic realism,' they not only reinvented what could be meant by both 'the novel' and 'the modern.' They also radically reinvented Catholicism itself as a religion equipped to meet and respond to the twentieth century."

That last line is quite a claim, but it's an interesting read. Love his citation of Bovary:

"The novel ends with a marvelous representation of Religion struggling with Science: the Catholic priest, Bournisien, and the pharmacist, Homais, in the room with the corpse of Madame Bovary, engaged in their respective and opposed rituals of purification: 'Monsieur Bournisien sprinkled the room with holy water and Homais threw a little chlorine on the floor.'"

Cartoon of the Day

As long as we're on the subject of faith and doubt...

To pure terror!

Book Two...

...had rather a lot dealing with the whole doubt thing. One bit, humbly offered up from my adolescence by way of thanks for the comments on the Thought Experiment:

The nearest I have come to taking a lyric seriously enough to ponder it was back in 1987, when I heard Christian rocker Steve Taylor’s “Harder To Believe Than Not To”:

They shiver with doubts
That were left unattended
Then they toss away the cloak
That they should have mended
Don’t you know by now why the chosen are few?
It’s harder to believe than not to.

It was years before I found out that the title was taken from Flannery O’Connor. Small world.

By the by...

...the company departs tomorrow, and Godsbody should return to what passes for regular posting on Monday.

In the meantime, an exchange:

Third Son: Mommy says to get in the car. Where are we going?

Dad: Sea World.

Third Son: No, we're not. Mommy didn't say!

Lest there be any doubt about who runs the house...

Believe...

...is the name of the new Shamu show at Sea World. It's more than a little risible, and more than a little terrifying. Instead of remaining content to dazzle onlookers with tons of aquatic mammal launching itself into the air, Sea World has decided to lend a little, shall we say, drama to the proceedings.

The show opens with a film montage about a boy who discovers pictures of killer whales in a book, whittles a whale tale, and then, as a teen, sights a killer whale off shore and paddles his kayak out to meet the object of his fascination. All well and good, if silly. But then it gets fun. Read the following in your best version of Portentous Movie Trailer Dude, because that's the same voice we all heard at the show:

"Two worlds. Two species. Driven at their very core to become one."

Good gravy. The question is, what sort of unity are we talking about? Is this a movie about forbidden interspecies love - a boy who dared to Believe in the power of his dream to marry a killer whale, despite the objections of a hardhearted world and the difficulties of underwater courtship? OR, is this a movie about the mad scientists who work behind the scenes at Sea World, laboring to create a man-whale hybrid while the unsuspecting masses enjoy the spectacle and unknowingly fund their fantastic dream? Either way, the voice-over reminds us, if we believe, then "all things are possible." Yeep!

The show (and film) ends with a montage of words which I think mean "believe" in various languages. Again, well and good, but if you're already chuckling over The Boy Who Shagged Shamu, you're liable to find some unintended humor in words such as "Glaub," "Tror," and "Geloodt" (not sure on the spelling of that last one).

Remember: Glaub in your dreams, and your dreams can come true. This, I geloodt.

Thought Experiment

Not that anybody out there would actually find themselves in a scenario like this, but if, hypothetically, you found yourself awash in crushing waves of doubt, what would you turn to for some kind of ultimate personal bedrock assurance as to the truth of the faith?

Seriously...

...what is the point of blogging when you can just spend all day watching stuff like this on YouTube?

Updates

Yesterday's News Today, peoples:

The boss's Catholic papers have shuffled off their mortal, printed coils and taken up the immaterial immortality of internet existence, and in the process, have joined into a statewide unity: California Catholic Daily.

You probably already know this, but Dappled Things has its Advent/Christmas issue up. Featured writer: Amy Welborn:

"You’d think that when it came to the coming-of-age novel, Catholics would be the masters. It’s the story of redemption after loss—isn’t that the basic Catholic story? Loss of innocence, exposure to the real world, hints of redemption, recollections glimmering like small jewels worked into an antique tapestry… you’d think.

In reality, though, there few instances of the genre in the Catholic literary pantheon. After Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the landscape of novel-length literary treatments is arid. Oh, pop culture is replete with them, crowded with Catholic school youths bumping and grinding against the constraints of frigid nuns and hypocritical priests. Short literary fiction boasts fine examples: Flannery O’Connor’s “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” and Bernard MacLaverty’s “The Beginnings of a Sin” come immediately to mind. These stories are funny and wrenching, just like the human experience they reflect. But is there a Catholic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Catcher in the Rye, a novel that’s an honest literary rendering of the moments when the veil is lifted on the adult world, when pedestals shatter and idols fall?"

Aphorism of the Day

Is a man ever more brilliant, more insightful, more clever, than when he is in the shower?

Gratitude...

...can, I suppose, be cultivated through practice, like faith. But like faith, there is an interior, passionate aspect to it as well - something suffered, something that comes over a soul, sometimes at odd moments. That experience of gratitude is not something you can will or summon up; it's a grace, and something to be grateful for in its own right. The latest occasion was a letter from a priest, who had both kind and thoguhtful things to say. Maybe Godsbody will have to soldier on a bit longer...

Today in Porn, Aging Boomer Edition

It just wouldn't be Godsbody if we didn't start the new year with Today in Porn, and lucky for us, the NYT makes it so easy:

"Still married to the same man after 28 years, De’Bella comes from a small town in Colorado and never imagined that she might become involved in pornography. 'I was married and had a baby at 19,' she says. 'I don’t know if I could have done it then.' That baby grew up and moved to California to become a sex-film performer under the name Jewel De’Nyle, which started her mother down the same path. De’Bella’s husband, Larry Schwarz, is fully supportive. 'She’s doing it for the right reasons,' he said."

No word on what those reasons might be, but wait - there's a local angle, which, as it happens, also includes a heartwarming family aspect:

"At 66, Dave Cummings bills himself as the oldest pornographic-film star working, though he is a relative newcomer to the business. Married for 22 years until his wife left him, as he put it, “for someone with hair,” Mr. Cummings has four grandchildren and a thriving film career. 'My daughter’s feeling is: "Dad, I love you. It doesn’t make any difference,"' he said by phone from San Diego, where he began swinging with couples after his divorce in the 1990s, which led to his sex-films gig. 'My son thinks of me as his hero,' he added. 'When he’s out chasing girls, he says, "Ever hear of Dave Cummings?" My son is getting action because of me.'"

And what man doesn't want to be a hero to his son?

Somewhere out there, Leon Phelps the Ladies' Man is clawing at his eyeballs after reading this.