Emo Jesus

Dashed off while attending a Christian service recently...

Aphorism of the Day

The danger in espousing the holiness of the ordinary is that you may end up supposing you are approaching holiness when all you are is ordinary.

Christianity: a million ways to miss the mark - and counting!

Marching

I knew that my parents marched in Washington, D.C. to protest the Vietnam War. What I didn't know until this morning was that they marched shoulder to shoulder with Flannery O'Connor super-mega-crush Robert Lowell...



and Norman "Prisoner of Sex" Mailer



(I also didn't know, until I read his Wikipedia entry, that Lowell was a major figure in Mailer's Armies of the Night - so now I'm wondering if my dad gets described therein...)

"Oh yeah," chuckled Dad when he told me. "Lowell and Gene McCarthy used to stay up late into the night reading poetry..."

Parents. It's like they had this whole other life before we were born.

Godsbody Goes Surreal

Ce n'est pas un dejeuner gratuit:



You know, because there's no such thing...

(Image taken from this guy, who's pretty good.)

Bang Your Head

Oddly enough, this amazing interview with Oliver Sacks doesn't address the effects of using the music of Quiet Riot to wake the dead. But it's still awesomely worth reading, you philistine. A snippet:

Wired: You call yourself an old Jewish atheist in your new book. What is it about music that lends itself to being a catalyst of mystical experience even for people who don't believe in God?

Sacks: Music doesn't represent any tangible, earthly reality. It represents things of the heart, feelings which are beyond description, beyond any experience one has had. The non-representational but indescribably vivid emotional quality is such as to make one think of an immaterial or spiritual world. I dislike both of those words, because for me, the so-called immaterial and spiritual is always vested in the fleshly — in "the holy and glorious flesh," as Dante said.

So if music is not directly representative of the world around us, then what's inspiring it? One has the feeling of the muse, and the muses are heavenly beings. This feeling is very, very strong with Cicoria, the surgeon in my book who was hit by a bolt of lightning. He felt that he was actually tuning in to the music of heaven — that he had God's phone number. I can't avoid that feeling myself when I listen to Mozart. I feel differently about Beethoven. I think of Beethoven as a sweating Prometheus, a terrestrial figure.

I intensely dislike any reference to supernaturalism, but I think there can be profound mystical feelings which do not have to call on fictitious agencies like angels and demons and deities. The whole natural world is bathed in wonder and beauty and mystery. The feeling of the holy, the sacred, the wonderful, the mystical, can be divorced from anything theological, and is conveyed very powerfully in music.

(Thanks to Manhattan Lawyer for the heads-up.)

Food for the monster

A novel by a friend of mine...Louis is in the bayou, struggling to get up onto the pirogue where Harlan is, before the gator comes:

"Harlan stood on the pirogue, and looked all around. He wondered where the gator was; he wanted that gator so bad. He thought about sharp teeth sunk into Louis's flesh, a wild tearing, the swift satisfying gush of blood. There was another turning in the water, and he thought he saw a dark shape: an animal, a branch, a trick of the light...Harlan stared at Louis's hands. He considered lifting his foot and crushing the bones, watching Louis slide down and disappear forever. He wanted to send Louis back, food for the monster. He looked away instead...A profound stillness settled over Harlan then. And gradually, he felt a presence, something that lived just beneath the surface of things. His skin tingled all over with anticipation. He thought of the gator, seen only when its hunger allowed. But always there. He looked at the sky. A thin veil of clouds drifted, white over the blue, seen through thick trees. He thought of the moon in daylight, visible only when the heavens allowed. But always there. And the truth was always there..."

"Do not store up treasure on earth..."

Yes, yes. Still, WSTS* at this list of TV's top earners.

*According to a brilliant old Onion piece, Weeping Silently To Self

Oh, what the heck...

For the curious, morbidly or otherwise, here are a few more Talk About Movies between myself, Mr. Grimm, and an array of colorful commenters.

Million Dollar Baby

Sophie Scholl

Little Miss Sunshine (Why oh why did it take me until the comments section to nail the film for not being true to its own premise - i.e., that we must be like Proust and accept suffering in life, instead of trying to pull a Neitschzean will to power - i.e. "I'm gonna fly planes!")

The Exorcism of Emily Rose

300

I think that ought to do it for a while.

Good grief.

Gawker has a perfectly ludicrous clip from Dirty Sexy Money. Oooh, a priest in a cassock acting like a bitchy queen. Don't the writers know that a really nasty Catholic priest (I mean, if there were such a thing) would be far, far more subtle than this? No, no they don't.

Serendipity II

Happened to be visiting an old friend who was himself visiting this idyllic valley:



And happened to come across a copy of Paul Johnson's Intellectuals, bookmarked to the section on Tolstoy, in which Johnson recounted various examples of the way that Tolstoy, who was forever caught up with love for all mankind, had considerable trouble managing to love this or that particular man, even his friends.



Then, after finally getting back to Alec Guinness's Blessings in Disguise last night, I happened upon this account of Tolstoy, told to Guinness by one of his friends, Sidney Cockerell:

"Later, up in the house, Tolstoy said he would like Syndey to see the billiard-room. The door was pushed open and they stepped into a large room, but there was no sign of a billiard table although it was there all right. The table was entirely surrounded and covered, nearly to the height of the ceiling, by tens of thousands of unopened letters which Tolstoy had thrown there. Stamps from all over the world, a philatelist's dream, could be glimpsed and Sydney turned to his host with a look of astonished enquiry. Tolstoy shrugged, muttered something about vanity and propelled him out of the room."

An astonishing image. One almost wonders if the billiard table haunted the great author (this or that particular man or woman, massed together into a credible substitute for all mankind, each of them seeking some form of communion - the reader responding to the writer). Otherwise, why show it to guests?

Culture Wars

A Godsbody reader was kind enough to wander over to Cal Catholic Daily, which plays host to an (almost) weekly back-and-forth about some movie or other between myself and Mr. Ernie Grimm. We have a lot of fun. So do the the folks in the combox. Last week, we took a gander at the Simpsons Movie. We liked it. Others were not amused. I may start linking to these more often. Feed the blog.

Support Your Fellow Catholics!

This guy:



Wrote this book:



Which gets reviewed here.

Serendipity

'Sfunny how these things go. I was here just a couple of weeks ago, and while I was there, I heard about this book. And then, I stumble upon this news of a movie about Jesus' Missing Years. You know, the ones he spent in India.

Jukebox

Man, I gotta stop this grass
Lay off all this drinking
Really gonna make my life last
Find out a new way of living
Up until the party last night
I was a different man
Old ways
Got their way again.
- Neil Young, "Old Ways"

If I Were A Better Blogger...

...I could have a slogan like this:

Godsbody. If you can find a better Catholic blog...you're probably Protestant.

Scenes We'd Like To See

"I had been doing lettering for the Catholic comic magazine Timeless Topics for several years. That was in St. Paul. I used to letter the whole comic magazine by myself: I would letter it in French and I would letter it in Spanish and it seems to me once I lettered the whole thing in Latin, sitting in my kitchen at night. I didn't know any of those languages, but they gave me the translations. I loved it. Once, I sold them two pages of little gag cartoons, four to a page, called Just Keep Laughing. He was going to run them regularly and then, after the second one, he said, 'No. The priest that runs the place doesn't like it, so I have to tell you that we don't need any more.' And then, one day, I had done a special rush job for them...and as a show of gratitude, he let me do a four-page story and that was the only thing I ever got to do for him."

- Charles Schulz, in an interview with Rick Marschall

Happy Feast Day to Him

I'm terribly attracted to these mystical types...I want something they have.

Happy Feast Day to Me

Hey! Caption contest!

"I told you, it's not finished yet!"

Abortion Debate

Yesterday's News Today, I know. Much has already been made of the treatment of abortion in Knocked Up, and it's not like this scene, which was heavily edited down in the film, hasn't been around on the internet forever. But for whatever reason, I'm just now getting to it, and it seemed worth noting, if only for the way it just barely exaggerates the way these conversations actually probably sound. The language, it should be noted, makes this deeply NSFW.

Support Your Fellow Catholics!

This man:



Wrote this book:



Which became this movie:



Which comes out today.

Hansen is also the author of the exquisite Mariette in Ecstasy. Which is not, of course, reason in itself to see the movie. And he's Catholic, which is not, of course, reason in itself to see the movie. The reviews, however, might be pretty good reason to see the movie.

Today in...Sigh.

You know Godsbody will never hit the big time?* Because we lack the killer instinct. When Jenny McCarthy - Irish Catholic schoolgirl, Playboy playmate, struggling actress and divorced mother - recounts the following in a story about discovering her son's autism:

"'Why, God? Why me ... Why? Why? Why?' McCarthy recalled thinking in those desperate moments, but then, she said, an inner voice came over her. 'Everything's going to come out okay.'"

...all we can bring ourselves to say is, "It's nice to see her talking to God."

*Okay, so it's just one of a thousand reasons...

Today in Porn, "Incredibly Intense" Edition

"My ordeal still goes on. The film Deep Throat still shows, and virtually every time someone watches that movie, they're watching me being raped."

If my understanding of this account of the script for Inside Deep Throat is correct, that's Linda Boreman (stage name: Linda Lovelace) testifying before the Meese Commission.

I make note of that only because of this: Anna Faris has signed on to a Lovelace biopic. "This would be incredibly intense," she says of the project. "It's a really deep, dark drama — and it would be cool for me to do."

Viz: "In the years that followed [the film], however, Lovelace reinvented herself as an anti-porn crusader, toiled in poverty and insisted that she had a gun held to her head off-camera during those infamous 'Throat' scenes, blaming the experience largely on her manager/husband Chuck Traynor."

This could be nothing less than astonishing. (Of course, it could also be horrid. Or, it could never happen.) And whatever Boreman's political motivations at the time, I'm pretty sure that bit of testimony would be a cinematic gut-punch. For background, it might be worth perusing Joe Bob Briggs' post-mortem article here.

CODA: The aforementioned script also contains this bit from Norman Mailer: "Sex is a force; it's a force like lava. And there haven't been too many successful engineering projects about diverting the flow of lava." Point taken, if only because it makes whatever successes, however limited, the Catholic Church has had in this arena look that much more remarkable.

Beginnings

The great photo discovery session continues...with one of my earliest shots of The Wife. Looking back, it's hard to believe that I didn't know right away. The cross around the neck, the beer in one hand, the saucepan in the other, the Morrissey poster behind her... I was 19; what did I know?

Awesome.

Yes, I played Dungeons & Dragons as a kid. Being a tall, gangly guy who followed the rules, I naturally chose to be a Chaotic Neutral Halfling Thief. (The Hobbit, anyone?) It was loads of fun, and we did some really fine paint jobs on those lead figurines. Oh, and I had this awesome green eight-sided die that...oh. Sorry.

At any rate, we were living in Boston when I first started playing (somewhere around first grade). Mom and Dad weren't worried that I would start worshipping false gods, but apparently, there was a story floating around about some guy who had been found wandering the Boston sewer system, brandishing a broadsword and looking for a red dragon. So there was, I think, a measure of concern.

Looking back, I'm thinking that was probably an urban legend. But that doesn't take away from the majesty that is Darkon. Which is apparently what happens when D&D heads move on from fighting imaginary monsters but don't want to put down the crossbow and pick up a paintball gun.



(Thanks to the Manhattan Lawyer for the tip.)

Treppenwitz

"The wisdom of the stairs" - thinking of what you should have said while on the stairs on your way out. (Thanks to the Wisconsin Poet for introducing me to that one.) A lovely sort-of almost example:

I was at a wine dinner hosted by a viticulturist who was big into biodynamics. During the dinner, he mentioned that biodynamics meant "life-forces." Also, that he was one of 11 children. At one point, The Wife and I went up to say hello. His dinner companion was a person I had met before, and was happy to meet The Wife of whom I had spoken so highly. As we chatted, the viticulturist invited us up to see his vineyard. The Wife, half-kidding, asked, "Can we bring the five children?" The acquaintance said, "That's right. I knew you had too many children." (Totally good-natured about it, though.)

My reply: "Well, we're very retro." I thought it was pretty good, given that the guest of honor was one of 11. But here's what The Wife was about to say, before I jumped in:

"Well, we're biodynamic. Life forces and all that."

MUCH better. And it would have set up this kicker from me:

"No herbicides, no pesticides, no spermicides."

Phooey.

The Irish and the Jews

Two great storytelling traditions, I'll grant. But Ed Burns as the next Woody Allen? Really?

"After directing 1995's 'The Brothers McMullen,' Ed Burns was seen as a rising star. People pegged the young actor and independent filmmaker as the next Woody Allen. Ed Burns was the toast of the town' after 'The Brothers McMullen,' but succeeding films didn't do as well. 'I was the toast of the town,' Burns tells Best Life magazine in its October issue. 'All of a sudden I was semifamous. There were six-figure checks.' But Burns' other New York-based films, including 'Sidewalks of New York' and 'The Groomsmen,' didn't fare as well at the box office, and failed to meet critics' expectations. 'I'd been trying to forge another version of Woody Allen's career...The whole idea was, stay in New York, make small dialogue-driven films,' he said. 'And I have to admit, I love most of my films. ... But at a certain point, you have to take your influence and find your own voice if you want to become a relevant artist.'"

Must...bite...tongue...

Today in Porn, Pastoral Letter Edition

Commenter JOB just posted something here that indicated a measure of frustration in the U.S. Bishops' response to The Problem of Porn. It's not like us here at Godsbody to treat this matter with anything like a degree of seriousness, but JOB's final question - "Can a group of grown men really be that out of touch?" - has gone and gotten us all Churchy. Here, then, for JOB and the curious, are two particular responses from the Grown Men in question: Bishop Finn's Blessed Are the Pure in Heart and Bishop Loverde's Bought with a Price.

Frightening

This is Jenna Jameson, one of the most successful women ever to work in porn. She is around 33 years old.

Here she is modeling a dress:

Of course, there are other professions that take a physical toll on a person. I imagine that by 33, a lot of NFL linemen are starting to feel pretty beat up. Still.

Fabulous

Found this among the family photos. If anybody has a more astonishingly awesome senior portrait from high school, I'd like to see it. Behold the majesty of the curly mullet. Thank God I had the good sense to distract attention from it with the loudest jacket/shirt/tie combination I could find in my father's closet.

Filthy

"Well, you did invite a Jesuit..."

People of the Book has Colbert v. Fr. James Martin on Mother Teresa. Not jealous. Not jealous.

Not that I'm the man to discuss Mother Teresa's crisis of faith. Just that I'd love to sit down with Colbert.

Today in Porn, PSA Edition

Oh, Lord. This anti-porn PSA from the '60s is nothing short of risible. (It's also sort of explicit, with a bunch of black bars obscuring segments of olde-timey nudie pics, so be forewarned.) I mean, T&A may not be something we ought to peddle at the newsstand, but to call images of backsides "an appeal to the sodomist" and to puzzle over shots of mammaries to the point of using the word "fetish" is more than a little odd. In fact, it's downright hilarious.

$#@%^&*%

Gawker gets indignant at the news that fabulist James Frey, who lied his way to a best-seller, has now received a monster advance for his new novel:

"Frey didn't just pull an Augusten Burroughs—it's not like the lies were 'discrepancies' attributable to 'we all have our own personal truths,' though he did use nearly that exact lame line. He blatantly wrote about factual things that never occurred as if they'd happened to him, and in doing so, made his readers feel sympathy and vicarious pain. He toyed with our emotions, and when we found out we'd been lied to, we felt betrayed...

But apparently it's a big so-what. Our culture isn't into consequences. Shame is the new fame. What yesterday's news means is that James Frey's career will continue, and as it does, the story of the fraud he perpetrated on four million readers will drift further and further down the page in any profile written about him, until it's in the last paragraph, until it's in the last line, until it's not there at all."

Experience

I have no desire to get all political here on Ye Olde Blogge, but I thought this was funny enough to overcome our political differences and bring the country together in the healing embrace of laughter. Afterwards, we can haz beerz and civilized debate.

Ur

The New Mexico Nurse has a fondness for ur-texts, the key bit that explains everything else. His own is from Plato, but I'm not going to give away more than that. I found this line from Benedict XVI in the "Blessings of the Month" section of my Magnificat:

"Just as the Incarnation of the Son of God reveals its true meaning on the he cross, so also authentic human love is surrender of oneself; it cannot exist if it avoids the cross."

I'm not sure it's the ur-text, but the notion of the cross as something woven into the very fabric of human nature - as opposed to some extrinsic thing turned to in order to explain this or that suffering - is very, very interesting to me. It's not that I'm unfamiliar with the notion of human love as self-surrender/self-emptying, but I've never seen it put quite this way.

I'll stop now.

Dept. of Advertising

Local casino Viejas has taken two adjacent billboards alongside the 8 West (because one is never enough) to let everyone know that "We Love Winners." Which keeps begging some enterprising young wag to get busy with the spraypaint and finish the sentence: "...But We Depend on Losers."

Mudflap Girls

The Wine Drinker, International and Birth Editions

(That's "Just a freaking minute" in the Birth Edition caption.)

Pitching II

Everybody knows that Lost's Sawyer read Walker Percy's Lancelot.



But I never knew, or at least, I had forgotten, that Sawyer also read Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time.



The man's tastes are perilously close to my own. At any rate, L'Engle died last Thursday, and when I heard the sad news, I immediately recalled a dinner conversation during our last sojourn at Red Rose Farm, during which we each expounded on which extant work we would like to see adapted for the big screen. Sadly, I can't recall who picked A Wrinkle in Time, but I do remember thinking, "Of course. A no-brainer for the people behind Chronicles of Narnia. And such amazing images - the children all bouncing their balls in perfect unison..."

Oddly, the only attempt at this wonderful book seems to have been this wan little TV movie. I can't help but thinking it deserves better.

Entrepreneurship, Part II

Drawing money to make money. This is part of the cover for First Son's new book.

Pitching

Someone wanna tell me why no one (to my knowledge) has made a movie based on this account of things? I mean, we've still got the mob, but it's miles away from Stone's JFK. There's so much dramatic goodness, it's hard to know where to start. Joe Kennedy gets Jack elected through his mob connections in Chicago. Younger brother Bobby decides to go after organized crime as Attorney General, starts finding out just how deeply involved his own father is, has to beg archenemy Hoover not to bring in Giancarla because he doesn't want his family's dirty laundry aired from the witness stand. Later, he has to beg Hoover to call off the Republicans in the Senate who are gearing up hearings that will reveal that Jack is diddling an East German woman who is most likely a spy. Hoover agrees in exchange for carte blanche in monitoring Martin Luther King. So just to be clear: the FBI gets to go all-out in tracking a citizen who is leading the fight for civil rights because the President has a taste for Communist skirt during the height of the Cold War. But that's just a subplot. The main story, alluded to by this author, is that the mob put Jack in office, and then, when Bobby mounted his campaign against them, the mob decided that Jack (and therefore Attorney General Bobby) needed to go. Jack rode to power thanks to the sins of the father, and was taken out thanks to the virtues of the younger brother. It's almost biblical, or something.

First Son has a question.

"Dad, with divorce so common, why are most rock songs about romantic love?"

Enterpreneurship

Lend First Son a digital camera, and what's the first thing he does? Tries to make a convincing image of a UFO that he can sell.

Thriller

Paul Elie on Walker Percy's The Thanatos Syndrome, from The Life You Save May Be Your Own:

"...one feels that this is the kind of book - it might be called a medico-philosophical thriller - that Percy should have been writing all along...The biggest breakthrough is Percy's discovery of plot, as significant a discovery as the discovery of the present tense in The Moviegoer. There is no telling whether he set out to write a thriller and supplied a plot or found plot inexorably leading him forward. Either way, one can feel a broad and felicitous territory opening up before him as he submits to the discipline of making the parts depend on one another."

On another day, I might quibble with Elie about the sort of book Percy should have been writing all along. But I've been feeling so awfully sick of thinking about art and not, you know, actually making anything that I've gone and hauled out an old screenplay idea and started in on turning it into something (marginally) more viable: a novel. And what do you know - onscreen, it might have played as an introspective character study, but on the page, it seems to demand a somewhat pulpier treatment. At least this way, I can claim Percy as a forerunner.

Here goes.

UPDATE: Been thinking about the oddity of something looking pulpy on the page and less so onscreen. Calling it The Godfather effect.

Dept. of Motivational Posters

Click to enlarge.

Happy kids are cool.

My Uncle Chad took the photo. That's cousin Joan on the left, Second Daughter center, and Third Son on the right.

Family.

Second Daughter (who is all of 18 months old) threw and broke a ceramic recorder-type instrument that Grandma gave us. Very sad. Third Son offered a comment: "Guess we'll have to get a new baby."

Not the new item I was expecting him to request.

Another Temple Gone

"Wander through the 11th arrondissement of Paris toward the dead celebrities of Pere Lachaise Cemetery, and there's a decent chance you'll stumble across a small gallery called 'Le Musée du Fumeur.' Unlike the hallowed halls of the Louvre or the Musée d'Orsay, there is no tyranny of expectation in this tiny, smoking-themed museum. No smiling Mona Lisa or reclining Olympia dictates where the random tourist should focus his attention. Thus left to meander, the drop-in visitor may well overlook the more earnest exhibits here — such as Egyptian sheeshas or Chinese opium pipes — and note the small, red-circle-and-slash signs reminding guests that, in no uncertain terms, smoking is strictly forbidden in the Museum of Smoking...To paraphrase what sociologist Dean MacCannell said a generation ago about folk museums, the best indicator of smoking-culture's demise is not its disappearance from public areas, but its artificial preservation in a place like Le Musée du Fumeur."

(Photo: Albert Camus. Thanks to ML for the tip.)

Another Temple Gone

Newspapers: sinking into the tar pits of media history.

"Despite a few disparate success stories, the largest players in the industry are having a terrible year. To whit: At Gannett, USA Today's advertising pages are down 17%, and real-estate ads in its community papers are off 20%. At Tribune, classified ads are down 18%. At McClatchy, real-estate ads are down by more than 25%, and automotive and national ads are both down 20%.

Even at News Corp's $5 billion prize, Dow Jones, classifieds are down 14%, while overall ad volume has declined 20%, including a whopping 75% fall in technology ads. And at the mighty New York Times Company, earnings per share dropped by more than half in the second quarter, leading the company to announce more than $200 million in spending cuts over the next two years.

Finally, the Newspaper Industry of America reported that industry-wide ad revenue was down 8.6% in the second quarter. At that rate, papers will all be broke in three years.

Taken together, it's a breathtakingly bad picture. And it is not poised to improve."

Another Temple Gone

Sigh. I understand that bourbon is a commercial product, and so marketing is going to enter into things here and there. And I get the appeal of noting that Abraham Lincoln grew up near Knob Creek, which, whaddya know, is the name of a bourbon. But when it comes time to polish your image, start with a regular guy, sitting on his porch and watching the sun go down, maybe with a dog lying at his feet. Maybe then you can move on to something a little sexier, or slightly more refined. Put your best ad boys on the job. But so help me, you do not put our 16th President in a two-buttons-unbuttoned shirt, chatting up a couple of hotties in a bar over Manhattans.

Now I'm just depressed. Where's that cocktail shaker?

"I wondered - do you like the music of Mozart?"

Apropos the earlier discussions of music and virtue - notice the clever way our heroine uses the litmus test of classical music to discover her suitor's true character:

Tidbit (Vanity Fair)

"You know the trains on the Continent?"

"I've never been out there."

"No matter. You see they have three warnings on the sills of all Continental trains, in three languages. 'E pericoloso sporgersi' - that's Italian. It means, 'It is dangerous to lean out.' Then the French, 'Defense de se pencher en dehors' - it is forbidden to lean out. And finally, German, 'Nicht hinauslehnen.' The Italians are the most courteous - they point out the danger, and leave the rest to you. The 'frogs' command you, and the Germans shrug it off without any explanation, just 'Don't lean out.' I suppose if we bothered to have a sign at all, it would say, 'The Company will not take responsibility for injuries incurred while leaning from the carriage.' Sums the countries up, rather, don't you think?"

The Wife...

...after two hours of sorting through 11 years' worth of family photos and realizing just how many boxes of pictures still remain:

"That's it. I need there to be a fire right now."

Exchange.

Me: So I've been thinking about this sketch - a cooking show about Tasty Baby Fingers. "It's generally acknowledged that the very best babies for this recipe are the ones you grow yourself. However, if the time and expense involved in growing your own pose too great a difficulty, you can usually acquire a satisfactory substitute at any ethnic market." Then a bit about how some people think it wasteful to take only the fingers and throw out the rest of the baby, but how true connoisseurs understand the sacrifice. "Though of course, there are plenty of good, hearty peasant dishes you can make from the leftovers - roast baby with baby carrots, Baby Bourguignon, etc."

The Wife: That's funny. I'm sure it would be a big hit. On the Internet. For free.

Me: You're just mean.

File Under: "It's Like Cockfighting."

Rich, rich stuff:

Whoopi Goldberg used her first day on the daytime chat show Tuesday to defend football star Michael Vick in his dogfighting case.

Goldberg said that "from where he comes from" in the South, dogfighting isn't that unusual.

[Like moonshining? I could be wrong here - but neither gets a lot of play in the press, so I figure my guess is as good as hers.]

"It's like cockfighting in Puerto Rico," she said.

[Oh. Well, then.]

"There are certain things that are indicative to certain parts of the country."

[Yes, indeedy. Some folks might argue that there are a few other things that are, while of questionable legality, 'indicative' to that part of the country, no?]

The Atlanta Falcons quarterback pleaded guilty to federal dogfighting charges last week, admitting that he provided money for a dogfighting ring that operated on his Virginia property and helped kill six or eight pit bulls. Vick grew up in Newport News, Va.

...

For many people, dogs are sport, Goldberg replied, and it appeared it took awhile for Vick to realize that he was up against serious charges.

[Which explains all the denials right at the outset, right?]

"I just thought it was interesting, because it seemed like a light went off in his head when he realized this was something that the entire country didn't appreciate," she said.

[Yes. Interesting. I don't even have the stomach for this any more...]

Something I Just Sent To A Fellow Catholic Writer

Do you happen to own a copy of Flannery O'Connor's collected works? if so, I absolutely recommend that you read her essay, "The Church and the Fiction writer." A couple of snippets: "What the fiction writer will discover, if he discovers anything at all, is that he himself cannot move or mold reality in the interests of abstract truth. The writer learns, perhaps more quickly than the reader, to be humble in the face of what-is. What-is is all he has to do with; the concrete is his medium; and he will realize eventually that fiction can transcend its limitations only by staying within them. Henry James said that the morality of a piece of fiction depended on the amount of 'felt life' that was in it. The Catholic writer, in so far as he has the mind of the Church, will feel life from the standpoint of the central Christian mystery: that it has, for all its horror, been found by God to be worth dying for. But this should enlarge not narrow his field of vision...When fiction is made according to its nature, it should reinforce our sense of the supernatural by grounding it in concrete observable reality. If the writer uses his eyes in the real security of his Faith, he will be obliged to use them honestly and his sense of mystery and his acceptance of it will be increased. To look at the worst will be for him no more than an act of trust in God...A belief in fixed dogma cannot fix what goes on in life or blind the believer to it...If the Catholic writer hopes to reveal mysteries, he will have to do it by describing truthfully what he sees from where he is. An affirmative vision cannot be demanded of him without limiting his freedom to observe what man has done with the things of God...It is popular to suppose that anyone who can read the telephone book can read a short story or a novel, and it is more than usual to find the attitude among Catholics that since we possess the Truth in the Church, we can use this Truth directly as an instrument of judgment on any discipline at any time without regard for the nature of that discipline itself. Catholic readers are forever being scandalized by novels that they don't have the fundamental equipment to read in the first place, and often these are works that are permeated with a Christian spirit. It is when an individual's faith is weak, not when it is strong, that he will be afraid of an honest fictional representation of life..."

No Mythology of Our Time Would Be Complete Without A Holiday Special

[Note to MCM - please don't think I'm making fun of your argument in the previous post's comments. I'm just happy to have an excuse to post this.]

"Uneasy at the influence" doesn't begin to describe it...

From Sir Alec Guinness' A Postiively Final Appearance:

"A refurbished Star Wars is on somewhere or everywhere. I have no intention of revisiting any galaxy. I shrivel inside each time it is mentioned. Twenty years ago, when the film was first shown, it had a freshness, also a sense of moral good and fun. Then I began to be uneasy at the influence it might be having. The bad penny first dropped in San Francisco when a sweet-faced boy of twelve told me proudly that he had seen Star Wars over a hundred times. His elegant mother nodded with approval. Looking into the boy's eyes I thought I detected little star-shells of madness beginning to form and I guessed that one day they would explode.

'I would love you to do something for me,' I said.

'Anything! Anything!' the boy said rapturously.

'You won't like what I'm going to ask you to do,' I said.

'Anything, sir, anything!'

'Well,' I said, 'do you think you could promise never to see Star Wars again?'

He burst into tears. His mother drew herself up to an immense height. 'What a dreadful thing to say to a child!' she barked, and dragged the poor kid away. Maybe she was right but I just hope the lad, now in his thirties, is not living in a fantasy world of secondhand, childish banalities."

Mudflap Girls

The Compleat Imbiber, Volume 5

Found this back in The Bookery, Ithaca's finest used bookstore. Bought it, to some extent, for professional purposes - I do write about wine for a living, after all, and this gem from 1962 is dripping with historical value. (It hails from England, and the intro. contains this fabulous line: "Raymond Postgate has gone to Yugoslavia to report on what is perhaps the most interesting and most promising of all the wine-growing countries other than France and Germany.")

It also contains Four O'Clock at the Five O'Clock, a wonderful English tribute to American bars - e.g., "Above all, there is the invigorating sense of sin." The essay notes, however, that "it is even misleading to talk at large about American drinking habits. In the Midwest you are asked to dinner at 4:30 in the afternoon. Four-thirty, did you say? They did indeed. So, still slightly confused, you gather at crumpet time and instead of the toasted buns, the ceremonial tea, out comes the lethal martini. Hours - days, so it seems - pass. At last, in the later watches of the night, at least four of you rise and walk in a disorderly rabble towards the dining-room. A centipede, no doubt, would carry off this situation with dignity: a mere moral, with this unexpected superfluity of limbs and four triumphal arches to negotiate, finds that the route has not been so clearly marked as it should have been. At dinner the only beverage served is cold tea. Years pass to the insistent tom-tom of one's hangover. No wine. No invigorating brandy. More cold tea in the salon. Then long past the witching hour of midnight, when drunkenness and hangover are one, comes the small whisky."

As someone who regards wine with dinner as the apex of the drinking experience, this is of no small interest. Our man goes on:

"There are the dehydrated Americans who have lived in Europe and know the ways of our decadent society. First of all sweet sherry served in tiny coloured thimbles. From the look and the taste it must have been lying about in the room for a long time - among the ranks of books, the Picasso reproductions. Scampi for the first course. the long-legged girl friend talks earnestly about the latest archaeological discoveries in Ur, or some such place. Roguishly, the host produces a bottle of wine. (Will there be brandy later, one wonders.) Of course, all this is old hat for the Europeans. One counter-attacks with questions about baseball. It reminds one, one says, warming to the unfamiliar subject (still thinking about the possibility of brandy) of the bull-fight. The grace of those movements! The way the pitcher stands glaring at the bull, the way the bull-batsman swings his bat horns. Which checkmates the girl friend. But does not produce the brandy."

Poetry from Vanity Fair

T.S. Eliot: The Boston Evening Transcript

The readers of the Boston Evening Transcript
Sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn.

When evening quickens faintly in the street,
Wakening the appetites of life in some
And to others bringing the Boston Evening Transcript,
I mount the steps and ring the bell, turning
Wearily, as one would turn to nod goodbye to Rochefoucald,
if the street were time and he at the end of the street,
And I say, "Cousin Harriet, here is the Boston Evening Transcript."

Happy Labor Day!

Granted, it doesn't have quite the same ring as "Festival of Labor," but still. (And yes, I know that when the revolution comes, I will be first against the wall.)

Today in Porn, Spam Edition

A bit of spam just hit my inbox - the pornspammers have gotten clever in these filtered times in which we live in (nod to Sir McCartney there): instead of sending dirty text, they send a graphic (usually containing a picture of some dirty text) along with a bit of gibberish. But this particular email's gibberish had a certain pedigree, and so I will reproduce it (but not the graphic) here:

"empirical nietzsche blurbist propagable greenish subterminal Whitehorse"

I can believe that an Empirical Nietzsche Blurbist would feel a bit greenish now and then, but I rather doubt that he would end up being propagable. I'm going to leave the rest alone, but feel free to have at it in the comments.

Sorry for the relative silence 'round here - it's all been dust and ashes of late.