Apologies.

Trying to get some things done...

Morte D'Urban on Catholic Radio International

The Wisconsin Poet introduces and reads from J.F. Powers' masterpiece, and does a fine job of it. Yes, he mentions me in the intro - I introduced him to this oddly neglected book, just as James McCoy once introduced it to me No, that's not why I'm blogging it. Our man sounds good.

Oh, and now that he's no longer reading my own little book, it's not unseemly for me to say this: spread the word about CRI and Cover to Cover. Add it to your sidebar. Bring the love.

Corpus Christi

One thing the Incarnation means is that the body matters.

Shakespeare in Love

Ernie and I visit the glory that was Miramax.

Artificial.

Second Son was watching Animal Planet at a friend's house, and saw a commercial for a feminine contraceptive. When he came home, he told his mother about it.

"I saw this medical commercial. There was this plastic thing shaped like a wishbone. You put it in your body, and it prevents pregnancy for five years. Is that really true?"

The Wife, who was amazed at the clarity with which he recounted the commercial, reports that his attitude was one of, "Oh, come on. They're trying to trick you. It doesn't really do that."

The Wife: "I think something like that would actually hurt your body. God doesn't want us to do things like that."

Second Son: "Yeah, He doesn't want anything artificial. He wants us to be the way He made us to be. You should just go ahead and have those children."

Fascinating. He didn't get that from us. Even if he ever overheard us discussing contraception, which is unlikely, we don't use the word "artificial" in relation to it. We just say "contraception." And we've never said anything like "You should just go ahead and have those children."

Sweet.

The first fruits of Second Son's garden:

Standby

Technical difficulties here at Godsbody. Blasted FTP server...

Today in Porn, Progeny Edition

(Hard to believe there was a time when I thought this particular blog feature had had its day...)

So GQ interviewed Hugh Hefner's son Marston. It's a pretty good read. A couple of choice bits:

Hefner himself gets interviewed as part of the story:

"But did you ever sit Marston down and do the whole birds-and-bees thing?

He shakes his head.

Did you ever try to explain the fact that, just after the separation, you started dating seven blond women?

'Not really. What is there to say?'

There was never any conversation about monogamy or marriage?

'What kind of conversation would that be?'

What kind of signal does that send?

'I think the signal that it sends, quite frankly, which the boys liked, was that instead of somebody replacing mama, I dated a bunch of girls.'"

Later, Marston talks about his taste in women:

“The ones I find attractive are brunet, blue eyes, and that’s about it. An intelligent woman that I can have a conversation with.… That centerfold in the magazine probably wouldn’t be my girlfriend, because I wouldn’t find her attractive. I don’t care about fake boobs if the girl has a good personality, but most girls with fake boobs I don’t find attractive—because of why they got the fake boobs in the first place.”

[Via Goldenfiddle.]

Sweet.

Driving through La Mesa at sunset, just as it got dark enough to notice all the streetlights/neon signs/traffic signals against the fading hues in the sky.

"Look at all the pretty colors," said Second Daughter.

Second Son demurred: "I'm having trouble putting together all the lights with all the things I see around me in nature."

(Minutes before, the children had been indulging in their traditional early summer car game of spotting purple-blooming jacaranda trees. La Mesa is full of them.)

He likes video games as much as the next kid, but the age's particular brand of techne doesn't have him.

Cool.

First Son got K'Nex for his birthday. This bad boy shoots missiles a long way.

Cool.

Sometimes, the Government gets it right:

Enchanted

Ernie and I should change our names to Statler and Waldorf.

Brave New World

I just heard Garrison Keillor doing backup vocals for Wilco's "Hesitating Beauty." (Now you can, too!)

Exiles

I once exchanged emails with Ron Hansen. I was blurb-begging for the little book. He said something kind about the sound of the project, but ultimately demurred - he was just too deeply involved with his latest novel - a novel about Gerard Manley Hopkins and his poem The Wreck of the Deutschland - to read and comment on my manuscript. I was suitably grumpy: "Novelists! How could anyone imagine that what they were creating was somehow more important than me?" (Do not answer that.)

Well, well, well: The Wisconsin Poet informs me that Hansen's labors have borne fruit - Exiles is out.

"Ron Hansen tells the story of a notorious shipwreck that prompted Gerard Manley Hopkins to break years of 'elected silence' with an outpouring of dazzling poetry.

In December 1875 the steamship Deutschland left Bremen, bound for England and then America. On board were five young nuns who, exiled by Bismarck's laws against Catholic religious orders, were going to begin their lives anew in Missouri. Early one morning, the ship ran aground in the Thames and more than sixty lives were lost—including those of the five nuns.

Hopkins was a Jesuit seminarian in Wales, and he was so moved by the news of the shipwreck that he wrote a grand poem about it, his first serious work since abandoning a literary career at Oxford to become a priest. He too would die young, an exile from the literary world. But as Hansen's gorgeously written account of Hopkins's life makes clear, he fulfilled his calling."

Something for the Catholic fiction crowd to sink their collective teeth into, no? I propose a book club - if not here, then somewhere more heavily trafficked.

SPECIAL BLOGGER BLONUS: Perry Lorenzo's blog is dormant now, but before he dimmed the lights, he delved deep into The Wreck of the Deutschland - an investigation/illumination that spanned many, many posts. It begins here.

What We're Up Against

No, not as Catholics. As Xers. Rise up, you slackers!

Today in Porn, Sotheby's Auction Edition

Noted without comment, except to say that yes, I know it's not really exactly porn, and that following the link will lead to an explicit image of the sculpture in question:

"[Pop maestro] Takashi Murakami... sat in the back of the room with a serene smile as My Lonesome Cowboy, his larger-than-life sculpture of a boy waving an ejaculate lasso, brought in $15.2 million."

Today in Porn, Literary Edition

So Chuck "Fight Club" Palahniuk has a new novel coming out, and this time, he's spending time in the world of porn. Specifically, in the green room on the set of a film in which an aging porn star attempts to go down in history by coupling with 600 men. Publisher's Weekly says, "There are sharp moments when Palahniuk compassionately and candidly examines the flesh-on-film industry, but mostly this reads like a cross between the Spice Channel and Days of Our Lives."

MEANWHILE, over at Korrektiv, F.X. Martin has a story up. It's explicit and skeevy and porny and Catholic.

Enthronement

On the Feast of Christ the King in the year 2000, Bishop Raymond Burke - then of the Diocese of La Crosse, and working as The Wisconsin Poet's boss - consecrated the diocese to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. For the enthronement, he commissioned an icon of the Sacred Heart to be painted (written) by four members of the monastic fraternity at St. Peter's Church in Tilden. As part of the consecration, and in an effort to bolster familial life, Bishop Burke also encouraged families to consecrate their homes to the Sacred Heart, and to enthrone the image therein. The Wisconsin Carpenter brought a copy of the icon out west when he came to work on Casa Godsbody, and we consecrated our home when our cousin Father Luke came to visit. But it was just last night that I finally built a throne (out of leftover bits from the kitchen remodel):

Passion

I rarely discuss the day job here on the blog, but I've already shared this story with FOG Ernesto, and it's too rich to pass up...

I was at a rather fancy wine event, talking to a perfectly delightful wine rep. At one point, said wine rep dropped the vocal tone into the Earnest range and said to me, "I can sense that you have a passion for food and wine." It was a sincere compliment, and given as an indication of possible future collaboration. Well and good. But when I related it to The Wife, it had the predictable effect: she hooted with laughter.

I smiled along, but the punchline was a solid two weeks in coming. The Wife, a couple of nights ago: "I can sense that you have a passion for fatty snacks and hard liquor..."

Guilty as charged. It's the new catchphrase here at Casa Godsbody.

Twelve

May 10, 1996:



May 10, 2008 - same couple, different wedding:

No.

Never mind the whole "Why give a liar a big fat contract? Because he's famous!" thing. If this review is anything like Frey's actual prose (and, to be fair, Carrie says it's not), then someone ought to be giving a contract to J. Peterman. Compare:

Maslin, channelling Frey:

"James Frey loved Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski and maybe even John Fante but he didn’t sound like them, he didn’t sound beat or cool. He sounded hopeful. He sounded unguarded, tender. He quit posturing. He stopped romanticizing squalor. He found new energy. He sounded more like Carl Sandburg in love hate thrall with great maddening Chicago than like the usual tough gritty moody chronicler of California’s broken dreams.

He wrote about people who were drawn to Los Angeles and who they were, why they came, what they wanted, whether they got it, if they didn’t get that, then what they got instead. He looked into their hearts. But he didn’t get sloppy, not maudlin. He just made up characters and wrote as if he cared about them desperately. Bright Shiny Morning. A new chance, real or illusory, that’s what they all wanted. Bright Shiny Morning. So he made that the name of the book."

Peterman, channeling Peterman:

"Gatsby was amazing. He even managed to see to it that the book about him was regarded as a novel, fiction, as though he didn’t exist.

Even Fitzgerald, by the time he was through writing it, believed he’d made the whole thing up.

There were those who knew the truth all along, of course; knew everything except where all that money came from. (Even by today’s standards, when millions mean nothing, only billions matter, Gatsby was incomprehensibly rich.)

Gatsby walked into rooms wearing a shirt with no collar. Even a little thing like that made people talk. And probably will still make them talk.

The Gatsby shirt, of course, has no collar. Only a simple collar band. The placket is simpler also: narrower. (Gatsby had them made in France, originally.)

The cotton we have used in our uncompromising replica of Gatsby’s shirt is so luminous, in and of itself, that even a person who notices nothing will notice something.

Gatsby, of course, could afford stacks of these shirts; rooms of them. Never mind. All that matters is that you have one, just one. A piece of how things were."

Today in Porn, Page 3 Girl Edition

God bless the Brits - there are just some things they do better. Obituaries, for one. This interview with pinup girl Keeley Hazell, for another.

Just a few highlights:

Do you ever wonder what men are thinking when they look at the picture in the Sun?

"I do. I find it really hard to try to guess what they are thinking."

You must be able to guess a bit.

"I kind of do, but then I don't know whether men would be thinking that, because it's just a picture of a girl, smiling, with knickers on. If anyone is thinking anything rude or sordid, they'd just look at porn."

Is it any different from porn?

"Yes. I don't see how you could get off on a picture like that. It's a girl standing there smiling. I don't know why anybody thought of having it in a national newspaper, it's such a strange idea."

And later:

Does Page 3 encourage people to see woman as objects?

"I don't think it encourages people to see women as objects. It's great that it's there because it introduces a bit of sex education."

Don't you think it encourages men to see women as a piece of meat?

"If a man is going to see a woman as a piece of meat, they are going to anyway."

Do you see yourself as an object for the pleasure of men?

"I separate myself from my job. I don't see myself as an object, I see myself more as a fantasy to men. What I am when I am in a magazine is not what I am now."

*****

The wise man distinguishes... It's a fascinating read.

[via goldenfiddle]

Iron Man

Ernie and I trade blows.

Where Mr. and Mrs. Godsbody Ate Their Dinner Last Night

Here, in anticipation of our 12th anniversary on Saturday. Thanks to the generous hospitality of FOG Karen, who is currently out west working for The Brotherhood.

The sunset did indeed grace our dining - the mountains along the coast fading into various shades of shadowy lavender as the sea and sky began to darken with twilight.

The restaurant was grand as well. The Wife's pancakes with corn and lobster were probably the highlight for both of us. All the elements were properly done - delicate, velvety pancakes; sweet corn, and oodles of lobster. When you're working with that kind of classic combination, you just need to step back and let the flavors shine, and they did. My filet was also very good: "Why do we stuff it with crab? Because we can." And The Wife was happy with her orgy of seafood, er, cioppino - so many samples!

The wine - an '05 Burgundy - was a good bit higher in acid than I expected, but it seemed to pass muster with the Women. So that was all right.

Before dinner, we met here. It was, I admit, a thrill to see the interior of an actual working television production office - dog food, bulletin boards, and all. (The Scotch and the coffee, at least, fit with my mental image of such places.)

And our hostess was driving one of these. I bugged The Wife to let me buy a Mustang when they came out. She said they were much too muscle-car. By this, I presume she meant they were much too muscle-car for ME. Sigh. Still - great fun to ride around Santa Monica with the top down.

By evening's end, I won the award for Most Bleary:

This one goes to eleven.

"A room without books is like a body without a soul."

(Joseph O'Brien, aka The Wisconsin Poet, contributes the second entry to Godsbody's Writers' Rooms series.)

I’ve not been able to track down exactly where Cicero might have said that, but it is attributed to him – although of course, in his day, a shelf of books looked more like Amazonian rolls of toilet paper in clay canisters shelved and stacked on their side in the broom closet next to the vomitorium across from the pederast’s rec room….at any rate, quietly stowed away from the majority of Roman intrigue.

I suppose THAT’s how Cicero got so much writing/speaking done, in the first place. And shouldn’t every writer’s office be a quiet and separate peace from the world?

Still, I think Rome’s greatest producer of sound-bites – or the anonymous medieval monk-wonk who probably put these words in his mouth – has a point. A good reader, as my father once told me, makes a good writer. If you write, you must have a heap of books to help you to the words.

I think it behooves a writer to surround himself with the words that will most enliven – and to do so in close quarters. My wife thinks I’m crazy. She likes open, airy, sunny spacious rooms. I like cramped cell-like boxes with niches, nooks, crannies (I’d even love someday to install a priest hole!) But to defend my tastes, if such is possible, there must be that bit of the monk-wonk in every writer that keeps his distractions to a minimum – well, at least outside the hundreds of volumes which on any given writing day will lure him away from a deadline to indulge the fictions of his mind….

(As ever, click on pics to enlarge - Ed.)

My writing for bread and breed is done mostly here.



And here my speaking for Catholic Radio International is mostly done.



Let me put it this way: it is not accidental that I work in stanzas, that stanza is the Italian word for room, and I that do most of my writing within a small unclean, ill-lit (pace, Papa) stanza of a million words.

Nor is it accidental that poem writing seems to attract an inordinate number of Catholics. (Even Robert Lowell practiced it for a while to claim a tradition richer than the Mayflower Pilgrims.) Every poetaster worth his saltpeter, whether he knows it or not, takes the tabernacle as the arch-model of composition: Christ in a box – eternity in a stanza.

The sole window in my box looks out into my gravel and dirt driveway (the last snow melted from it April 12), my woodshed (now empty), and a case of jerry rigged stairs leading to the main porch entrance of the house (no broken necks, yet). Not the stuff of dreams, for sure, but then, I usually do all my more important, non-income-related writing at night anyway – the stuff that really counts because it never does. With lights low or off altogether, my view of Parnassus is usually lit not by the great vistas of Wisconsin outdoors but by the narrow candy-blue gaze of my computer screen.

Of all the unbound objects in my room, my hardwood chair is the most prized. I prize it as much as Queequeg did his idols. As the Israelites did their golden calf. As any pope, king or shoeshine does his cathedra. It is a strong piece of furniture, impossible to fall asleep in and it has endured the roughest tanglings and wranglings with meters, paragraphs, modifiers or parallel structure the muses ever dealt a man….

As for the room’s arrangement, it has been forced through necessity – the bookcase on the left of my desk is awaiting a more permanent placement once the rest of my house gets built by the man known in these pages as the Wisconsin Carpenter. Thus the compulsive symmetry of desk and window is completely accidental. By no means should one infer an ordered mind thereby.

Flanking (left and right respectively) desk and chair, the ship clock and pipe rack remind me to make time for tobacco – and the bottle of hooch tucked in the desktop bookshelf I mention without comment… because I am not currently under its influence. Of course, if you’ll give me a second…

As I sit at my desk, surrounded by books, I have a wonderful wooden statuette of St. Joseph peering back, ready to go to work, a carpenter’s square cradled in one hand and a piece of raw lumber held up by the other. (I can’t have lares; but I can certainly have a patron.) Behind me are more books and behind those books are even more books.

I believe in writing this way because (and here I put a plug in for one of the greatest essays on writing ever written) as T.S. Eliot said, “What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career. What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality” (Tradition and Individual Talent). I have Homer, Ovid, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wallace Stevens, Eliot himself, Ezra Pound, and most recently Robert Graves (gratiae, Matthew!) and other literati looking over my shoulder at all times.

The conversation often takes place, and it often goes something like this…
“O, naught will the definite article’s pow’r,
Lest Adam forc’d by Satan speak it thus,” says Milton with grave countenance.

“Thou Jack, thou knave, thou very porcubine’s quill,
As definite speaks best so best it will!,” chuckles Shakespeare.

“The indefinite article sings its huzzahs
Beside the probable pear
The indefinite article sings its hoozahs
Beside the oracular pear,
The indefinite article is the only fiction
The pear, the fiction’s cast of mind
The pear and the definite article are one,” insists the sober Wallace Stevens

“I do not hope to turn
I do not hope to turn again
I do not hope to turn this word
Etherized as an etymologist in a London public house
Unsure of what to do with a definite article,” Eliot testily retorts.

And so on…

For some the pressure might seem too great – how does he get a lick of writing done with all those voices micromanaging his use of something as simple as an article? Because the tradition is stamped with an individuality – (if not a talent). And that’s where the room helps. These books represent my own assortments of subject matter; my chaos of indices; my organized entropy; my unholy choir of Dis in holy compact with humility; my concordance of immortal voices hushing me to say something sensible.

Yes, tradition pushes, but I gently push back….

Indeed, at the end of the writing day, I like to push chair back from desk – it scrapes across the tiles in clamorous annunciation – push my hat back, push a cigarette in my face and push a shot of whisky down my gullet. That done, I look around at my books and say farewell for now as I prepare to reemerge from the cave, into the full light of the quotidian, its steady rays warming me to family life and fatherhood.

But is it not the quotidian we live to, if not for? The room has books, the body has soul, and so I am a man content to move in the world – if not with the world – my head full of words given room to grow.
“For it is commonly said: completed labors are pleasant.” Cicero also said that. At least I read that he had….

Post script:

Here is a poem I wrote on the occasion of the office’s inauguration

The Open Cave: An Inaugural

The books in my library press their golden titles to early morning sunlight.
If I choose my steps carefully as I walk along the abridged space
From one shelved end to the other of this most difficult case at hand,
My fingers moving down up down up, east to west to south to north,
I can find the truth indexed in words, diurnal synopsis of wisdom’s content.

Although intertextually bound to this body of literature, eastern sunlight
Will always go unrecorded beyond this western shelf of booked space.
To compensate, the wind’s drama replays itself in tall weeds like hands
That grow outside my window, shades wriggling in a breeze from the north,
Reaching like skeletal ghosts, shivering down the varied spines, content

To serve as reality’s appendix inscribed by sharp stylus of slanted sunlight.
The room is small by most standard vertebrae; for my books it is space
Enough altogether to open up in, and for me to read their words, a slow hand
Moving across codex mosaics, beginning my trek in the frigid margins of north-
Pole whiteness. But the paper soon crisps into its proper tropical content,

Riveted with paragraphs patterning out like clouds, reading into sunlight
As each turned page snakes around and shapes up into an idea. The space
Of knowledge is a sentence. But the good man knows he is dealt a bad hand
By equally serpentine statements: Fools have considered good and evil north
Of their interests ever since, lengthening the winters of their discontent.

As a result, we are forever seeking to hide in our underground sunlight.
So, I return to this cave. I must; but mindful to see the infinite space
A squat 90 square feet of library can provide. And to dare to take in hand
One of these books is to blind the ignorant “I” between the lines, unearth
A shadow,
make an assent in black and white,
and pull up to a table of content.

Recovering

I took First Son to Magic Mountain yesterday for his 11th birthday. I also took a year off my life.



(I didn't take this video. But I did ride this ride. Twice.)

Phoenix? In June?

Looks that way.

What's he got against his home state?

Some of the Better Roman Graffiti We Encountered...

...and there was a lot of it.



No, not the "orgy." The Lego riot police. I'm getting my kid the '68 Democratic Convention edition - learning can be fun!

Dappled Things

Our Hopkins-headed friends have done it again - the new Dappled Things is up online and out there in print. The Editors continue to display their uncanny eye for talent, manifested in the first place by an appearance from the Wisconsin Poet. They also managed to wring an essay out of Godspy regular and Idylls Press illustrator John Murphy. And there's fiction! (Hello, InsideCatholic...) Go thou and read. Me, I just look at the pictures.

OUCH.

From the New York Observer:

"Then there are the truly epic downfalls of authors like James Frey, whose fabricated memoir caused his life (and his seven-figure two-book deal with Riverhead) to shatter into a million little pieces. Now he’s writing two novels without a contract and posting on the blog and message boards on his Web site, bigjimindustries.com—the literary equivalent of living in a trailer park."

[Emphasis very much mine.]

Benedictus

"Today God is still mysterious; indeed he seems to have a special kind of obscurity in store for each person's life. But could he ever render any life as dark and incomprehensible as he did Mary's? This is the real reason for her greatness and her being called blessed: she is the great believer."

I swear, Benedict XVI is going to be remembered as the Apostle to the Doubtful.

Rome: Monday: Orvieto: Rustic Church on Sidestreet

It's not all grandiosity and glory, but even the simple spaces have their beauties...I rather like the tiny tabernacle, set into the wall.

Rome: Monday: Orvieto

Okay, Lissa is tripblogging circles around me, so I'm gonna take a few minutes to bend up my will and actually get some things down on, um, paper?

We had one day for a day trip. Orvieto or Assisi?

Assisi had the Basilica of St. Francis. Francis, for all his garden-statue ubiquity, was one of the truly great "either a madman or a saint" saints. One of the few who manifestly managed to be madly in love with the world without letting the world get its hooks into him. One of the few whose wild abandonment into the hands of God has not managed to exile him to the margins of society. A popular saint, perhaps the popular saint. Or else a madman.

I had been there before, back in '91, and it had been the highlight of my trip to Rome and Medjugorge. I was already high on Chesterton's book on Francis, which I'd brought along on the trip, and being there was little short of euphoric. I discovered that there were gray-robed contemplative Franciscans - perfect. (Because I'm such a contemplative, you see. And was even moreso at 18.) And for aesthetics: Giotto frescoes:



But of course, there is a downside to popularity. Assisi, as I remembered it, was also home to the single highest concentration of plastic rosaries, cheap San Damiano crosses, and Franciscan Tau crosses (just like the ones worn by the Third Order Regulars!) on God's green and glorious earth. Not a dealbreaker, not by any means - welcome to humanity and all that - but something to toss in the balance when considering the choice.

Orvieto? Orvieto had a personal recommendation from Victoria, whose years in Rome had provided us with so many fine recommendations. "Definitely eat pasta with tartufi neri (black truffles)," she wrote. "If you don't want the white Orvieto Classico, a special type of Umbrian red wine is Sagrantino di Montefalco." Truffles and wine. And we had already been told of the Duomo and its contents (more on that in a bit). I told myself that the personal trumped the popular pious, and that this wasn't simply about my appetites. The Wife felt the same way. So, after our first really bad food in Rome - a leathery panini purchased from a cart in front of the Termini, followed by a do-over lunch of wine, salad, ham, and mozzarella in the Termini itself - we boarded the train heading north toward Milan...

Catholics and The Media

Clayton sends word:

VATICAN CITY, 30 APR 2008 (VIS) - Pope Benedict's general prayer intention for May is: "That Christians may use literature, art and the mass media to greater advantage in order to favor a culture which defends and promotes the values of the human person."

Time to get busy...

Bragging Rights, Revisited

Karen has an update. God be praised.