New Favorite T-Shirt

Try the braided garlic loaf. Also, the sandwich loaf. Also, the pastries. Also, everything. The place is run by a guy from my high school class. It's wonderful.

And finally...

...a word in defense, even if it is oblique. Alec Guinness, in recounting his conversion to Catholicism in his memoir Blessings in Disguise, tells a story from the days when he was filming The Detective (a film based on Chesterton's Father Brown stories). Guinness, still in his priestly costume, is walking back to his hotel in France as it gets dark:

"I hadn't gone far when I heard scampering footsteps and a piping voice calling, 'Mon pere!' My hand was seized by a boy of seven or eight, who clutched it tightly, swung it and kept up a non-stop prattle. He was full of excitement, hops, skips and jumps, but never let go of me. I didn't dare speak in case my excruciating French should scare him. Although I was a total stranger he obviously took me for a priest and so to be trusted"

The boy takes his leave as they pass his home, "and I was left with an odd calm sense of elation. Continuing my walk I reflected that a Church which could inspire such confidence in a child, making its priests, even when unknown, so easily approachable could not be as scheming and creepy as so often made out. I began to shake off my long-taught, long-absorbed prejudices."

Of course, such a story carries a note of deep sadness today. The scandal has indeed been scandalous. But it is a good story, all the same.

While I'm at it...

...I may as well include this bit from Fitzgerald's The Crack-Up:

"The easiest way to get a reputation is to outside the fold, shout around for a few years as a violent atheist or a dangerous radical, and then crawl back to the shelter. The fatted calf is killed for Spargo, Papini, Chesterton and Henry Arthur Jones. There is a bigger temporary premium put on losing your nerve in this regard than in any other." Hoo!

Iron Strengthens Iron...

...so I suppose it's worthwhile to post, after highlighting that bit from Chesterton in my collection of '20s-'30s Vanity Fair, some word against against the man from the same volume - i.e., from one of his contemporaries. The magazine asked various worthies to name "the ten great writers whom they find most thoroughly boring...we have all heard about the people who don't know much about art, but know what they like.' Here we present you with a number of people who know a great deal about art, and who know what they don't like."

Christopher Morley guessed - correctly, I think - that the magazine, "in asking this appalling question hopes to be answered, not by a list of such classic bores as Carlyle or John Stuart Mill or Dr. Frank Crane, but by the names of contemporaries. This, obviously, will lead to a rousing hullaballoo and healthy irritation." (Bonus points for using "hullabaloo.")

Morley didn't list Chesterton among his ten bores, but Ernest Boyd did. Here is Boyd's opening: "One is tempted to begin at the beginning and list all the five-foot bookshelf geniuses, Homer, Virgil, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, and so forth, but here is an opportunity to be indiscreet. So, instead of taking refuge amongst the defenseless dead, I will mention my imperfect sympathies amongst the moderns."

Chesterton has good company - Boyd goes after Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad, among others. Here he is on G.K.: "Gilbert K. Chesterton, the cheap punster in excelsis, strenuously engaged in persuading clean-limbed Englishmen that there was ever such a place as 'Merrie England,' full of beer and Catholicism." It's a charge worth answering, I think. Any experts out there willing to take it on?

And before you dismiss Boyd, please note this dismissal of D.H. Lawrence: "the average Briton in the toils of sex, a sad spectacle."

"Out of either devotion or desperation..."

Apparently, Owen Wilson stopped into a Catholic church before bottoming out. The post title is taken from Us Weekly's account of the visit. (Not that I make a habit of visiting Us Weekly, mind you...)

Lo, I am become Hipster, the destroyer of worlds...

Saw Wilco last night at San Diego State's Open Air Theater. Oh, my. I don't think they were terribly impressed with the crowd, but they still put on a hell of a show. Easily one of my top three concerts ever. Loved the way they could pull sounds from Pink Floyd, the Allman Brothers, Squeeze, REM, Skynerd, They Might Be Giants (!), Hendrix, et. al., and make it all their own. A very happy birthday present.

Deviants

I know I'm late to the party on this one, but the "Release the Deviant" Scion billboards have finally gotten me to post...



Lovely. A car ad that sells the notion that its buyers are creative types. But not just creative types - creative types superior to the rest of the world - the Sheeple. And not just creative types superior to the rest of the world - creative types superior to the rest of the world who may therefore slaughter and terrorize the rest of the world however they wish. Nietzsche, anyone? I wonder how the man would feel about being used to sell cars.

Oh, look! There's a game as well!

iLie

First Son has been enjoying Ye Olde Family iPod Mini of late, and driving everyone to distraction with his near total departure from communal life while he's listening. Boy is elsewhere. So when I see two people, both wearing iPods, dancing together, I don't just think, "Wow, it must be difficult to synch your iPods so perfectly that you can dance next to each other and not look like a human hiccup." I think, "Nope - iPods are not communal - or rather, earbuds are not communal. Stop pretending otherwise. While you're at it, stop shaking those maracas as if the music you're hearing isn't entirely digital." Grumpy old Dad, signing off.

Please Stand By

Technical difficulties with Ye Olde Internet Connection. Back tomorrow, hopefully.

The Gods

Rome continues its drive to become the most religious show on television (or at least, on DVD - season two is finally out). [SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT.] Vorenus curses his children to Hades, and seconds later, they are kidnapped and sold into slavery. Later, Vorenus blasphemes the gods for the sake of worldly influence, and within weeks, all around him is war and terrible solitude. Later still, his friend Pullo, who is genuinely (if simply) pious, says the gods are tricking him, leading him back to Rome to see Vorenus when Vorenus isn't there. But who IS there? A woman who tells him that Vorenus' children are not dead, but enslaved - so there is hope for the despairing Vorenus. Servilla is captured by Atia while she is praying to a Mother Goddess. Atia tortures Servilla and promises to kill her, but throughout, Servilla continues to pray. And eventually, she is delivered. The list goes on. There are varying attitudes toward religion - some see it as a tool, some see it as nonsense, some see it as reality. It's complicated, and it's interesting, and it comes off as a perfectly natural part of life, not some freakish add-on. I'm a big fan.

Mudflap Girls

As ever, click to enlarge.

Inspiration?

And the kicker is, both of these songs got/get painful amounts of airplay:

She got out of town
On a railway New York bound
Took all except my name
Another alien on Broadway...
Baby, baby, baby
When all your love is gone
Who will save me
From all I'm up against out in this world
Maybe, maybe, maybe
You'll find something
That's enough to keep you
But if the bright lights don't receive you
You should turn yourself around
And come on home
- Matchbox 20, "Bright Lights"

Hey there Delilah
What's it like in New York City?
I'm a thousand miles away
But girl tonight you look so pretty
Yes you do
Times Square can't shine as bright as you
I swear it's true
- Plain White T's, "Hey There Delilah"

Broadway, Times Square, whatever. The important thing is that girls go to New York, and the lights are bright there, and the guys stay home and pine.

Catholic Geekery

So, did anybody else notice David Webb's dog tags in The Bourne Supremacy? Religion: Catholic.

And yet, there are more would-be authors than ever before...

Gawker notices a poll that suggests that people may not be reading quite as much as they once did...

Jukebox

Bad Religion, indeed:

Now get up and give in I'll crack your knuckles again
Supplicate and survive this transubstantiation
And get so mean - I want to know what it means

- from "Honest Goodbye"

I'm thinking this has to be the first time "transubstantiation" has appeared in a pop lyric on the radio.

Sometimes, you eat your vegetables...

(Click to enlarge. Via Defamer.)

Dept. of License Plates, Unmarked Government Vehicle Edition

Thrown Out At First

Whiffle ball can break your heart...

Paul Morand on The Art of Dying

From Vanity Fair:

"'It is an unfortunate man who doees not know how to die,' said Seneca. But who knows how to die? Who has meditated upon his eventual demise, or prepared the final farewell he will take from the living? Death, which we force ourselves not to think about, at last finds us stupefied, terror-stricken with fear or shocked into silence. If, by some extraordinary circumstance, we do not entirely lose our heads and remember that the moment is a solemn one which should be commemorated with a few words, we are incapable of finding anything to utter but venerable stereotypes. To us moderns should be applied the remark of the accomplished Abbe Gassendi in the eighteenth century: 'I was born knowing not why. I have lived knowing not how. I die knowing neither why nor how.'

"The reason for this is that we have lost at the same time our scientific assurance and our faith in the beyond. We no longer embark majestically for the Great Divide as our atheist fathers did; but our departure is even less characterized by the trembling religious ecstasy of our devout grandsires. We have not, as they had, a ready answer to the enigma of death. Gripped by the made excitement of living, we seldom worry about it...The art of dying, like the art of living, alas, is lost."

There's lots more, much of it good, but I'll spare you any more death for today.

Guinness on Death and Faith

"'Oh, you are lucky to be a Catholic,' people sometimes say, as if my Premium Bonds had paid a handsome dividend. Well, yes; but the constant failures are painful, when not just laughable, and boringly repetitive. A few years ago, on an Ash Wednesday, standing in line to be smudged on the forehead with ashes, as is the custom, a small boy of about seven was immediately in front of me. In front of him shambled a man probably in his late eighties. Behind me stood a very pretty young woman. Each of us, as the ashes were imposed, would hear the words, 'Remember man, you are dust, and to dust you will return.' Caesar, the Pope, the small boy, one's friends and oneself, all destined to be blown away, recycled or reconstituted: I cannot see much to grumble at. Others coming after us will love much of what we have loved and many new beauties besides. The ashes imposed on our heads are the burned, pulverized and blessed palm branches left over from the previous year's Passion Tide; and another Easter is always on the way.

"The longevity of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, her wisdom and kindness, can well embrace the naive strugglings of an adolescent English schoolboy kicking, so to speak, against the pricks. She has books to read aloud, pictures to show, consolations to offer, strength to give and some marvellous people, from all ages, to hold up for the world's admiration; not many in high places, perhaps, but thousands in the market square, hospital ward, back pew, desert and jungle. And in recent years, when she has been swift (at last) to acknowledge her human failings, they have been found occupying the Chair of St. Peter.

"The fear I mostly entertain is that my personal religion is notional rather than real; but i can say, with the nineteenth-century New England Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller, 'I accept the universe'; and, with Carlyle, his rejoinder, 'Gad! She'd better.'"

- from Blessings in Disguise

G.K. Chesterton in Vanity Fair

The Brother read this section at dinner: "Bad Books and Bad Beer," taken from the essay, "The Soul of Skylarking: Thoughts on the New Renascence and the Structure of the Future."

"Thus it is said, for instance, that the public likes bad books. But in England, at any rate, if it likes bad books it is very much as it drinks bad beer. It does so because it cannot get any good beer; and has to choose between bad beer and something that is not beer at all. So the ordinary reader often has to choose between bad books and things like those which Charles Lamb called books that are not books. He has to choose between a bald and badly written story, about love and murder, and a story that is not a story at all, but a medical diary describing the more minute sensations of an incipient lunatic, or the pros and cons of erecting a tin chapel for some new religion. The more refined artists have been driven to this, not so much because they are so lucky as to find nerves and new religion interesting, as because they are so lamentably unlucky as to find love and murder uninteresting. They have lost their normal power of enjoying enjoyable things, such as murder and love making. The very novelty of their art is the fatigue of their minds. The artists are trying to enjoy fresh things with a stale mind, while the public is still enjoying stale things with a fresh mind. That fresh mind is the first need of a fresh society.

"It is more convenient to take a concrete case; and will take the case of poetry, especially the poetry of nature. it is an old joke that papers and the public are tormented by a swarm of Spring poets, who come out like the birds in Spring. it is an old joke that the editor receives a million original Odes to the Skylark, and generally prints the worst of them. But even if the Spring poetry is worthless, the Spring is not worthless. Like death and first love, and the other materials of the detective story and the novelette, it is a marvel none the less real for being recurrent. In short, the little poet, like the large public, may not be occupied with great works; but he is occupied with great things. It may be tiresome to listen to the poet on the skylark, but it is not tiresome to listen to the skylark. At least, it ought not to be; but it is the whole problem of the new and fastidious artist that it is."

New Favorite (Old) Thing

No, not that Vanity Fair - the old one. The one that ran from 1914-1936. The one that featured articles by (to drop a few of the better-known names) Dorothy Parker, Thomas Wolfe, Alexander Woolcott, Aldous Huxley, P.G. Wodehouse, Andre Gide, Noel Coward, Gertrude Stein, George S. Kaufman, Carl Sandburg, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, and George Jean Nathan.

One of the great pleasures of my vacation was a solid hour of browsing in The Bookery, a truly excellent used bookstore in Ithaca, New York. It was in the Bookery, years ago, that I stumbled upon Up In The Old Hotel, the Joseph Mitchell collection that did as much as anything to inspire my journalistic efforts. And it was in the Bookery - in the bargain book section, no less - that I happened upon a collection of the best of Vanity Fair from that remarkable era - $5. I've only just begun dipping into it, and it has brought me considerable pleasure. I think I'm going to be putting interesting bits from the book up on the blog as a semi-regular feature - if only as testimony that magazines like this once existed, and even flourished. (But not only that. Also because it's really good stuff.)

Memoriam for a Mentor

Judith Moore was, up until her death last year, my editor at the day job, and something of a mentor. (It was she who, in the little book, asked me if I needed to be a paterfamilias.) She was certainly a Fairy Godmother - I owe something of whatever success I've had to her happy assistance. She is remembered, by myself and other Reader writers, here. My entry is entitled "Let the Tape Recorder Do the Work;" The Wife's is "She Knew How Fragile Writers Could Be."

Aphorism of the Day

Mercy is humiliating.

New Best Opening Line to an Actor's Autobiography Ever

"Enter EGO from the wings, pursued by fiends."
- Alec Guinness, Blessings in Disguise

Another lovely bit: Guinness is speaking with Dame Sybil Thorndike, a fellow actor: "One day, I said to her, 'Aldous Huxley writes somewhere that no actor can be good, because no actor can develop his own personality and know reality. What do you say to that?' She made one of her impatient 'P'shaw!' sounds and then added, in a strong, indignant voice, 'Rubbish! Actors are good people. I know there are some silly ones. Perhaps there are some nasty ones, but I don't know them. Our people are good.' Her own goodness was deep inside herself: it appeared to cost her no effort; and yet to say that is, perhaps, unintentionally to diminish her."

Signs.

The Brother paints 'em on bits of weathered wood he's dug up around The Farm. At least some of the fonts are his own design. If anybody's interested in buying one, let me know - I'm pretty sure he'll take requests. If you ask nicely, he might even dip into the vernacular.

The Pond Was Low This Year...

...but vacation at Red Rose Farm was particularly full. Back now - not exactly rested, but perhaps a touch exhilarated.

My Blanket and Me

Well, word has it that Lindsay's back in rehab, and it looks like I'm about to undergo my own version of withdrawl - we're off to Red Rose Farm, and The Wife has encouraged me to leave The Computer behind. Back sometime around the 20th, if I survive.

It's for the best really. Godsbody's traffic was starting to pick up, and it's important to nip things like that in the bud...

The Queen is Dead; Long Live the Queen

Open Book is no more. Amy's got a brand new blog.

Fun with Acronymns, Crude Edition

I've gone down the grumpy Catholic road, and I have no desire to go down that road again. I don't like what it does to me. But damn it, what is up with a hymn that says "You and I are the Bread of Life"? No, we're not. Yes, we are members of Christ's Mystical Body, joined to Him through spritiual adoption so that we may be heirs with him to the Father's kingdom. (Can I get an amen?) Yes, our holiness depends, ultimately, on our union with Christ, the extent to which we become like Him, the extent to which He dwells in us. Yes, we can even speak of being transformed into other Christs - and in a particular way, through our reception of the Eucharist. But it's still Jesus who is the Bread of Life, the Bread come down from heaven, the Bread that gives eternal life to those who eat of it. Yes, I am united to Christ through baptism and through love. But if you take a bite out of my arm, it ain't gonna be a step toward the beatific vision. Stop Hymns Inimical to Truth.

Dept. of Questionable Taste

No, I'm not going to tell you what I was doing reading the Wikipedia page on sodomy. But I will share this too-neat-to-be-true tidbit:

"A 1924 entry in Evelyn Waugh’s diary states that an English High Court judge presiding in a sodomy case sought advice on sentencing from Lord Birkenhead. 'Could you tell me,' he asked, 'what do you think one ought to give a man who allows himself to be buggered?' Birkenhead replied without hesitation, 'Oh, 30 shillings or 2 pounds; whatever you happen to have on you.'"

Eggs, scrambled.

A propos the earlier post on NFP, Defamer has the video version of a story sent by the New Mexico Nurse: The Pill for Pigeons. Basically, it's population control through a modified food supply. Happily, PETA is on board! "'We're not trying to fool with Mother Nature,' said Stephanie Bouyles, a wildlife biologist with PETA. 'People are using cruel methods to kill these animals. We're trying to get them to solve problems in a kind way but in an effective way.'"

Reached at the Vatican, Glendale's Cardinal Billy Bamberger, Secretary for the Congregation for the Improvement of Public Spaces, commented, "We're just glad that pigeons are not, as far as we know, intelligent animals imbued with a special dignity that comes from sharing in the divine life of God, and so are therefore not persons properly understood, and so may therefore contracept like crazy with no fear of impeding the divine plan for human communion through the marital embrace. Heck, I don't think they even have to be married."

Mother Nature, however could not be reached for comment. As of press time, all reporters had to go on was this cryptic line spoken by Mother Earth in Hesiod: "My children, you have a savage father. If you will listen to me, we may be able to take vengeance for his evil outrage; he was the one who started using violence."

(Thanks again to the New Mexico Nurse for the quotation, however mangled my use of it here.)

Mudflap Girls

(If anybody's having trouble reading the text, I think clicking the image will enlarge it...)

The Wine Drinker Lives!

Well, at least long enough for one last glass...

Woke up this morning...

...from a vivid dream in which I was a seminarian, racing around campus trying to borrow some clerics for some sort of institutional Mass. I'm thinking this is either because I recently saw my friend the Detroit Seminarian, or because after a while, NFP takes its toll on the subconscious.

Which reminds me, it's been ages since we've done one of our "real meaning of NFP" sessions...

NFP=No Fellatio, Pervert
NFP=Non-Fertile Partytime
NFP=No Fetal Production

Add your own in the comments.