Dear Fellowship of Southern Writers,

I would totally pay money for a print of this photo. Thank you.

Mr. Godsbody (aka Mr. November)

Darkest line from Dark Knight.

"Sometimes, the truth isn't good enough. Sometimes, people deserve to have their faith rewarded."
- Jim Gordon

The obvious implication being, the truth will not reward your faith. What you believe is a lie.

Six quirks.

Karen tagged me. Here are the rules:

6 Rules:
1. Link the person(s) who tagged you
2. Mention the rules on your blog
3. Tell about 6 unspectacular quirks of yours
4. Tag 6 fellow bloggers by linking them
5. Leave a comment on each of the tagged blogger’s blogs letting them know they’ve been tagged
6. Wait and see how far it spreads.

1. I "smoke" my pen cap. I started in college, in order to keep from taking up smoking, which was rather popular among my friends and acquaintances.

2. Sometimes when I'm concentrating, I stick the tip of my tongue out the side of my mouth - just like Charlie Brown used to do when he wrote his Pen Pal!

3. I pitch fiction projects and write for a newspaper, in spite of the obvious futility of both pursuits.

4. I am, despite all evidence to the contrary, ridiculously vain about eyewear, and get the itch to buy new frames about every two years.

5. I love Open Houses.

6. Despite all my efforts to quit, I continue to blog.

I'll tag the first six poor souls who read this and have blogs themselves.

What Color is Your Anxiety? Bright Orange.

With apologies to T.S. Eliot, it should read:

"I will show you fear in a handful of Cheetos."

Teeth Marks II

From Pajiba’s review of Teeth:

“It’s not that mixing genres is inherently bad, it’s that Lichtenstein seems to be mashing them up simply because he doesn’t know quite what else to do. Dawn’s first ‘attack’ scene is a horror show mined for dark comedy, and the next image is of a dazed and confused Dawn wearing her ‘Warning: Sex Changes Everything’ T-shirt. Had Lichtenstein played the visual gag down, or at least given it more than 15 seconds to come up, it would have come across as the kind of satirical irony he seems to take it for, and not the head-slapping moment of cuteness that it actually is. Lichtenstein’s haphazard shifts from one genre to the next, instead of making the film feel unclassifiable, actually wind up harming the central narrative and robbing it of some of its weight.”

Is that a smart way of saying that Teeth bites off more than it can chew?

Teeth Marks I

Got an email from the California Lawyer yesterday, in which he recounted stumbling across Teeth in Ye Olde Video Shoppe. He didn't rent it, but he also couldn't believe I hadn't written about it.

Actually, I had - but for another blog, and the other blog ended up never running the posts. So now they've ended up on the ash-heap of Godsbody. The language gets a little blue. Reader discretion is advised.

Teeth (now in theaters!) tells the story of a Dawn, a high-school beauty who “works hard at suppressing her budding sexuality by being the local chastity group’s most active participant.” But when she becomes the victim of a sexual assault, she “discovers that she has a toothed vagina.” That’s right, she’s “a living example of the vagina dentata myth.” Fun!

But kids today, they don’t know from nothin’. So the film’s website features a helpful tutorial. Let’s fisk, shall we?

“Vagina dentata, the unconscious belief that a woman may eat or castrate her partner during intercourse -- literally, the ‘toothed vagina’ -- is a classic mythological symbol of men’s fear of sex.

[Well, which is it? Unconscious belief or mythological symbol? Do men unconsciously believe that women will castrate them during sex? Or does the toothed vagina stand for something else? Say, the power of sex? Or woman’s power over man in the sexual arena? (See also, p****whipped.) But let’s not quibble!]

It appears in the mythology of countless cultures and societies down through the years.

• One Native American myth states ‘A fish inhabits the vagina of the Terrible Mother; the hero is the man who overcomes the Terrible Mother, breaks the teeth out of her vagina, and so makes her into a woman.’


[Um, is this about the fear of sex, or about the fear of matriarchal domination? Never mind – next!]

• The Yanomamo said one of the first beings on earth was a woman whose vagina became a toothed mouth and bit off her consort's penis.


[Which makes you wonder how we ever got the next beings on earth…]

• The more patriarchal the society, the more deeply rooted the fear seems to be. Men of Malekula, having overthrown their matriarchate, were haunted by a Yonic spirit called ‘that which draws us to It so that It may devour us.’


[There has got to be a Nine Inch Nails song in here somewhere…]

• Chinese patriarchs said women's genitals were not only gateways to immortality but also "executioners of men."


[Yeah, there’s pretty much no way to comment on this without crossing whatever lines there are left to cross…]

• Muslim aphorisms said: "Three things are insatiable: the desert, the grave, and a woman's vulva."

[You mean to say that all this time, porn has been telling the truth about women? That they really do live in a state of perpetual sexual desire? Muslims and porn: finding common ground at last.]

• Polynesians said the savior-god Maui tried to find eternal life by crawling into the mouth (or vagina) of his mother Hina, in effect trying to return to the womb of the Creatress; but she bit him in two and killed him.

[Again, is this fear of sex, or another way of saying that you can’t go home again? That Mommy’s vagina is not where you belong?]

Looking into, touching or entering the female orifice seems fraught with hidden fears, signified by the confusion of sex with death in overwhelming numbers of male minds and myths.

[Oh. I thought the confusion of sex and death came from ecstasy – ex-stasis, standing outside yourself, the ‘little death’ of orgasm. Turns out it was just our fear of caves.]

Since vulvas have labiae, "lips," many men have believed that behind the lips lie teeth. Christian authorities of the middle ages taught that certain witches, with the help of the moon and magic spells, could grow fangs in their vaginas. They likened women's genitals to the "yawning" mouth of hell. How’s that for romantic?”

[Almost as romantic as taking time out to unroll a condom over your engorged member! Seriously, though. I’m not about to mount a defense of medieval attitudes toward sex. (Heh, heh, he said, “mount.”) But I do think it worth noting that those “Christian authorities” viewed the fanged vagina as an aberration of nature – the purview of witches, who altered nature via magic. That’s a little different from simply regarding everyday, ordinary vaginas as “executioners of men.”]

Dept. of Belated Birthday Gifts: Very funny...

...though it would be funnier if I was, well, actually writing a novel these days. Still, thanks much.

No...

...I haven't seen Brideshead yet. But I did enjoy this early review:

Making notes in 1949 for a review of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited , George Orwell wrote that “Waugh is about as good a novelist as one can be... while holding untenable opinions.” Which is a nice way of saying that Waugh, a world-class satirist of everyone from the rich down, was also a social-climbing snob, an anti-Semite and fascist sympathizer, a hater of modernity and by extension (as anyone knows who has read The Loved One, his handy evisceration of the California funeral business) all things American.

[Really? I thought it just meant that Waugh was a Catholic. Learning is fun! I'm pretty sure it's wrong on the "all things American" count, however. The man didn't think we were a nation of Joyboys.]

Not that this deterred the millions of Americans who wolfed down the British television adaptation of Brideshead when it aired on PBS in 1981. Cruising right past the novel's crass Yank (disguised as a Canadian, but it was all the same to Waugh)

[That's a pretty damning thing to say about a novelist. Seems to me a novelist's virtue lies in picking out exactly how things are not the same. But then, I'm not a film critic!]

...who does business with the Nazis and sells his wife for a few paintings,

[?]

just about every Anglophile I knew fell for the lovely country seat and its delicate-featured nobles dripping with diamonds, Catholic guilt and all. Personally, I never saw the point of stretching out this crisply written and none too long novel about England collapsing under the pressure of social change into a depressive 11-hour slog.

[Ah - a contrarian.]

A movie adaptation, even one passed through the pop filter of co-writer Andrew Davies, British TV's designated gatekeeper of all properties literary to the masses, sounds like much more fun. And though I can imagine Waugh rolling his eyes at the very idea of Brideshead Revisited as “a heartbreaking romantic epic,” this remake is, often inadvertently, closer to the novel's spirit than the sepulchral television series, albeit still not half as waggishly Waugh-ish as Bright Young Things, Stephen Fry's delightfully naughty interpretation of Vile Bodies.

Adapted by Davies with Jeremy Brock, Brideshead isn't much of a story. Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode), a wan young student who comes from trade, is taken up at Oxford by the feverishly gay

[If Sebastian is feverishly gay, then what is Blanche? Plagueishly gay?]

and increasingly alcoholic aristocrat Sebastian Flyte (Ben Whishaw) and soon finds himself caught up in Sebastian's struggle with his intensely Catholic family. What it lacks in plot, however, is made up for in atmosphere and constant movement. As directed by Julian Jarrold (who already displayed impressive chops for jollying up the classics by bestowing a saucy love life on Jane Austen in Becoming Jane),

["Jollying up the classics" is my new favorite euphemism.]

Brideshead Revisited -revisited is a less gloomy affair than its predecessor, boasting better stately homes and gardens bathed in a warm chocolate glow, colorful trips abroad to Venice and Morocco, a marketably youthful cast, and broad winks at the novel's repressed homosexual attraction between Charles and Sebastian.

["Bathed in a warm chocolate glow" is my new favorite cooking term. But again - what does the "catalog of mortal sins" line from Charles' description of the summer indicate if not a homosexual attraction that was not repressed?]

Nothing wrong with any of that—Waugh was an observant creature of the Jazz Age he deplored.

[Did he always deplore it? Did his worldview shift at all after his disastrous first marriage? After his conversion? After the early novels? Who cares!]

If the movie strives and fails to redirect the erotic flow to the heterosexual love between Charles Ryder and Sebastian's sister, Julia Flyte, so, too, did Waugh, almost certainly a closeted homosexual inhibited by his conversion to Catholicism.

[Why didn't I know this? Why does the reviewer know it? More importantly, how does the reviewer know it?]

As Julia, Hayley Atwell has none of TV-Julia Diana Quick's tortured inner radiance, and when she and Charles finally rip off their silken evening clothes aboard a cruise liner, you want to laugh, or look away. In the end nothing that goes on in this youthful triangle proves as compelling as the great, sick love story between the teddy-clutching Sebastian (Whishaw is show-stoppingly queeny and heart-stoppingly vulnerable) and his mummy, an ice-floe nicely understated by Emma Thompson as a woman at once energized and doomed by her devotion to Catholic orthodoxy.

[Ah. It's a movie about a gay and his mom.]

Waugh, whose cruelty to others in life and literature was legendary, was merciless in taking down this rigidly controlling woman and the son she destroys. But the truly malevolent power of Brideshead Revisited

[Malevolent? Methinks I hear an axe beginning to grind...]

is his identification with what she stood for — a literal reading of the Vatican texts,

[BAM. Because everybody knows that the Vatican texts must be read figuratively, metaphorically - like the Bible!]

the preservation of ancient tradition,

[AIEEEE! Ancient = malevolent?]

and keeping her snooty class free of contamination by interlopers like Charles — and Waugh himself.

[Right. Because English Catholics were entirely of a piece with the rest of the English aristocracy. That's clear in the novel.]

Late in the day, Waugh turns a pitiless, accusing gaze on Charles' unacknowledged motives for worming his way into the Marchmain household, and makes him over as a species of villain. You can't read this switcheroo in the 21st-century

[A century unclouded by warm chocolate glows!]

without revulsion at the self-laceration with which Waugh punished himself for his own pent-up sexuality

[! No, seriously: !]

and his yearning to join a class he was not born into, and at his retreat into unbending religious orthodoxy. Still, though Brideshead Revisited the movie is far from deep,

[Unlike this here review!]

you have to admire the way it refrains from seizing the day for a post-modern lecture on the perils of fundamentalism, and confines itself to the disturbing vision of Evelyn Waugh.

[Like this here review!]

Not dead. Just unlively.

I think.

No.

This is the 1,939th post to Godsbody. Sixty-one more and I ought to be able to retire in style...

The NYT gives us a glimpse at what is to come:

THE images from the 11-episode mini-series are still vivid, 27 years later. Louche young Oxford students in crisp linen suits (and one teddy bear) drinking endless cocktails. A spectacular country estate, dripping with treasures and crackling with religious, sexual and dynastic tensions. A delicately beautiful Jeremy Irons.

It is those lingering memories, even more than Evelyn Waugh’s novel, that anyone attempting to turn “Brideshead Revisited” into a feature film for the first time naturally has to contend with. And so as not to contaminate his approach Julian Jarrold, the director, studiously avoided the mini-series — all that elegiac emotion, spread out over 659 languorous minutes — and returned to the book.

[Yay! A sound approach. Except...]

“It exposed some of the myths I’d had about ‘Brideshead,’ ” Mr. Jarrold said of his rereading. “I’d had the memory of it being a nostalgia trip about the passing of English life and a bygone era, a glorification of aristocracy — about people wearing odd clothes and poncing around Oxford.” That was part of it, he said. But there was also a bite and a sharpness that are as relevant now as they were in 1945, when the novel was published.

“One of the reasons for the book’s popularity is, it is an archetypal type of story of this young individual from a poorer, less interesting background who is welcomed into this beautiful, magical, alluring kingdom with wonderful, magical people,” Mr. Jarrold said. “And then he begins to realize that everything is not what it seems.”

[You know, I'm still with you, pal. "Nostalgia trip" is a trifle flip - mourning the end of an age is more like it. But okay, let's see what you've got...]

The film, which is to be released on Friday, is set in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s and stars Matthew Goode as Charles Ryder, the unworldly student whose friendship with the aristocratic Lord Sebastian Flyte (Ben Whishaw) introduces him to a whole new world of money, class privilege, deep happiness and deep despair. Castle Howard, an estate in Yorkshire, stands in for Brideshead, home to Sebastian and his family, a symbol of a dying way of life and a character in itself.

The mini-series was written by John Mortimer and stars Anthony Andrews as the teddy-bear-carrying Sebastian. It opens and ends with Charles (Mr. Irons), now a British Army officer, unexpectedly encamped at Brideshead during World War II. He begins to replay in his mind the role Brideshead, with its dark sorrows and bewitching delights, played in his life some 20 years earlier.

In this new version the filmmakers have, of necessity, pared down the story. World War II comes up only at the end. There is less time to dwell on the seemingly endless summer when Charles and Sebastian meet and their lives gradually become entwined. Some supporting characters given prominence in the mini-series — Sebastian’s younger sister, Cordelia, played in the original by Phoebe Nicholls, for example, or his waspish friend Anthony Blanche (Nickolas Grace in the series)— appear only glancingly in the film.

[Right - the film's religious conscience and its aesthetic conscience. Gone.]

“It was a terrible struggle, and we worked for many, many hours on the screenplay in order to make the right choices,” said Jeremy Brock, who wrote it with Andrew Davies. “But bluntly, you have a 330-page novel and a two-hour film, and you don’t have the luxury of being able to include everybody.”

[Agreed. And the choices you make give some indication of the sort of story you want to tell.]

The filmmakers also have played up the love triangle of Charles, Sebastian and Sebastian’s bewitching sister, Julia (Hayley Atwell). An extended scene during a night of erotic possibility in Venice serves to advance Charles’s romance with Julia. (All the changes — including placing Julia in Venice — were approved by the Waugh estate, the filmmakers said.)

[And there's the parenthetical knife.]

“This puts Julia center stage,” Mr. Brock said of the Venice scenes. “When you read the novel, there is a sense that she is slightly the one who comes after Sebastian, that she is No. 2, and I think it’s not quite fair. The true love story for Charles is the one with Julia.”

[Um - "Sebastian was the forerunner." She was never number two - she was the Real Deal after the intimation. IT WAS NEVER A TRIANGLE.]

And while the homoerotic longings between Charles and Sebastian are more implied than explicit in the earlier incarnations, in the film they share a quick kiss. Instantly their easy camaraderie is polluted by a new awkwardness and inhibition.

“There’s a sense that maybe they’ve crossed a line that one of them isn’t ready to cross,” Mr. Brock said of the kiss.

[Um - what about the "love between English boys" speech? What about the "mortal sins" cheerfully mentioned in the novel, even in the midst of the happy summer? Something seems have been lost in translation...]

In a surprising casting move Lady Marchmain, the matriarch whose deep religious faith reverberates so tragically through the lives of her children, is played by Emma Thompson, made up toward the end of the film to look much older.

“I always associate Emma Thompson with being youthful and contemporary and playing decent, sensitive characters, whereas obviously this is the complete opposite,” Mr. Jarrold said. But Ms. Thompson can play old as well as young, lacing her character’s prodigious charm with a chilly savagery.

As much as it is a story about a lost period of English history — a final shining moment before everything changed forever — “Brideshead” is a novel about the inexorable pull of Catholicism. The issues it raises are particularly relevant now, Mr. Brock said, though viewers may interpret what they see differently depending on the role of faith in their own lives.

A scene toward the end, when the Marchmain family tussles over the soul of Lord Marchmain (Michael Gambon) as he lies on his deathbed, is wrenching and even shocking. After abandoning his wife and her self-sacrificing piety for a life of sensuality and ease in Italy, Marchmain has returned home to die. But what sort of role should Catholicism play, with its ability to pull in lapsed members with a “twitch upon the thread,” as Waugh put it, citing G. K. Chesterton, at the end of Marchmain’s life? To Charles’s fascinated horror, the question is of central importance to the family, and there is only one possible answer.

“In that tug between individual freedom and fundamentalist religion, there’s a story that’s apposite for our time,” Mr. Brock said. “In the modern age that’s something we’re all dealing with.”

[Ahem. Fundamentalist religion? Really? Wonder why the man came home to die? But at least they get the scene's importance.]

An important divergence in tone from Waugh’s novel, Mr. Jarrold said, comes in the closing scene, when Charles — now back at Brideshead during World War II — talks to Lieutenant Hooper, a fellow soldier who has a rough accent and the forthright views of a modern man unimpressed by the aristocracy. How to portray him led to long discussions about the way that Waugh “is sometimes profoundly undemocratic” and disdainful of Hooper and what he represents, Mr. Jerrold said.

In the book Hooper is “described as a traveling salesman with a wet handshake,” he said. “But he’s the future of England, and the hope of the 1945 generation, and we’ve put a positive spin on him.”

[And there you have it. The Age of Hooper, dipped in gold.]

Inside Catholic Book Club, Day Five

The series concludes with a visit from the author, Ron Hansen. Thanks to any and all who joined in!

Incidentally, Hansen has a piece on the question of ethics and historical fiction, a question that was at least touched upon in the course of our discussion, here.

Inside Catholic Book Club, Day Four

One more time.

Inside Catholic Book Club, Day Three

Here we go again...

Esquire

Andy Warhol on TV, December 1975:

"Television is so important to my life I watch two color sets at the same time, doubling my pleasure, always in bed, usually while I'm talking on the phone to somebody who's watching the same thing. Sometimes I switch from color to black and white for a few seconds. That's very nice. I am never bothered by reruns. During the summer you can watch whatever you didn't watch during the winter and tell yourself you're watching something new. I like really old reruns because the people stay young forever. On the other hand, it's fascinating to study people getting old on up-to-the-minute TV. I have watched Barbara Walters get older, and, do you know, she has another crow's-foot. I've been counting.

I mainly watch the major networks, as well as the movies on the local stations. I hate PBS because it is too intellectual and gets me depressed. PBS tries to make you feel guilty for watching their stations without paying. I would rather have someone trying to sell me something than someone trying to make me feel obligated. Moreover, commercials are pick-me-ups; programming becomes too intense if there aren't enough commercials in between. Whenever I watch a show 'without commercial interruption' I get itchy...

The Catherine Deneuve ad for Chanel [is] one of the best ads I've ever seen, and it shows that if you really spend the money and get the right celebrity, you get your money's worth...Catherine Deneuve really makes you want to be Catherine Deneuve, and if you have to eat blueberries and wear Chanel No. 5 to do it, fine."

Inside Catholic Book Club, Day Two

The Wisconsin Poet arrives on the scene...

Esquire

Joan Didion on the Shopping Center, December 1975:

"'The Shopping Center,' the Urban Land Institute could exult in 1957, 'is today's extraordinary retail business environment...the automobile accounts for suburbia, and suburbia accounts for the shopping center.' It was a peculiar and visionary time, those years after World War II to which all the Malls and Towns and Dales stand as climate-controlled monuments. Even the word 'automobile,' as in 'the automobile accounts for suburbia and suburbia accounts for the shopping center,' no longer carries the particular freight it did then: as a child in the late Forties in California I recall reading and believing that the 'freedom of movement' afforded by the automobile was 'America's fifth freedom.' The trend was up. The solution was in sight. The frontier had been reinvented, and its shape was the subdivision, that new free land on which all settlers could recast their lives tabula rasa. For one perishable moment there the American idea seemed about to achieve itself via FHA housing and the acquisition of major appliances...

"I recall staying late in my pale blue office on the twentieth floor of the Graybar building to memorize David D. Bohannon's parking ratios. My 'real' life was to sit in this office and describe life as it was lived in Djakarta and Caneel Bay and in the great chateaux of the Loire Valley, but my dream life was to put together a Class A regional shopping center with three full-line department stores as major tenants. That I was perhaps the only person I knew in New York, let alone the Conde Nast floors of the Graybar Building, to have memorized the distinctions among 'A,' 'B,' and 'C' shopping centers did not occur to me...my interest in shopping centers was in no way casual. I did want to build them. I wanted to build them because I had fallen into the habit of writing fiction, and I had it in my head that a couple of good centers might support this habit less taxingly than a pale blue office at Vogue."

Exiles Book Club Begins

I try to get the ball rolling over at Inside Catholic. Read the book and spread the word and join in the conversation. We'll be there all week.

Dappled Things

The new issue is out, though not all online. Even one of The Wisconsin Poet's offerings is reserved for print. But another, Maritime, is all there, Eddie:

Emerging cold and desperate, his whiting breath
Trails behind him like the old ship’s own signature
Disgorged in blunt belchings of smoke from its belly
Through a single squat stack piping up the trying pots.
The wit-starved whaler tells his hunger-angry crew:
Sing a tune from groggy memory; desires supply the words.
There’s the sea and he scans it like a line of poetry...

Esquire

Oh, how timely! Here we have a movie out about Hunter S. Thompson, and here I have an old Esquire with a letter from the man himself! If the masses read this blog, I'd be relevant. Sort of.

"In the August Esquire (So there I was on TV! Me, Sally Quinn! Oh, my God!), Sally Quinn falsely attributed a statement to me. 'Hunter once defended his brand of journalism,' Sally wrote, 'by saying, "Well, I would say that over forty-five percent of everything I write is true."' I get misquoted a lot and I'd go stark raving mad if I brooded about every little instance, but this one is just a little too heavy to ignore, mainly because I have never said, implied, suggested, or even thought a thing like that. What probably happened - and Sally seems to agree with me on this - is that she picked up some bastardized fourth- or fifth-hand version of an answer I often give to people who ask me how much of my book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is true. For reasons that should be perfectly obvious to anybody who's read that book, I usually reply with a figure ranging anywhere from sixty to eighty percent. But of the three books I've published, I think Hell's Angels and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 are at least as verifiably true as anything else ever written on either subject. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, however, is a very different kind of book. It was conceived and written essentially as an experiment, a conscious attempt to mix journalism and fantasy - and this is what causes a lot of people to wonder and occasionally ask just exactly how much is true.

However the confusion arose, I want to emphasize that I have never made any such statement and never would, since it is not true.

Hunter Thompson
Woody Creek, Colo."

Esquire

Gonna spend some time highlighting this wonderful issue from December of '75. First, because I still write about wine sometimes, here's a wine ad where they tried to sell a little-known grape known as California Chardonnay. This was before the famed Paris tasting of '76, soon to be highlighted onscreen in Bottle Shock, and we were still playing kissy-kissy with the French...

"Not every Chardonnay bears our distinctive French nose. Swirl it in your glass. Sniff. The nose tells you this is Almaden, an authentic Chardonnay with the decidedly French 'fresh apple' aroma.

Truly, it is the ultimate in still white wines, for our Pinot Chardonnay originates from the same grape that even now creates the most expensive white wines of France.

A shy, temperamental grape that does poorly in most areas, the proud Pinot Chardonnay matures to glorious perfection on the sunny hillsides within the Almaden region of Northern California. Here it produces a golden fresh wine, a rare joy to be sipped and studied, not merely swallowed.

Almaden Pinot Chardonnay. It bears a lesson one never tires of learning.

Only a fine grape can produce a fine wine. Almaden."

The best is behind us, no? Forget ads, I can show you wine columns that won't go that far in suggesting that a wine might benefit from thoughtful attention, so ingrained is the fear of wine snobbery.

Self-Portrait

Swiss Guard - Coming Soon to a Theater Near You

SWISS GUARD. The most sophisticated military technology in the world. The best trained mercenaries anywhere, with the best hardware. Protecting the Pope.

Story focuses on one guardsman. Once, he was a seriously bad dude, a hired gun who went to war for the highest bidder. Then he had a conversion experience, and repented as best he could, eventually finding his way into the Guard's badass uniform. (I mean, seriously - it's practically a superhero costume. What fun to put it in all sorts of nasty situations, where most folks would be wearing black and/or camo.) But serving in the Vatican brought him too close to holiness and its opposite, so that sometimes, he's convinced the holy folks are just deluded, and the sinners are running the show. By this point, he's not even sure he believes anymore. He's even thinking that it wouldn't be such a bad thing if someone took the Pope out, brought down the whole house of cards. But he swore an oath...and now he's uncovered an assassination plot...

WHY HAS NO ONE CAST JIM BROADBENT AS AN AGING EVELYN WAUGH, RAGING AGAINST MODERNITY AND POSSIBLY GOING INSANE?

Inside Catholic Book Club (Reading can be fun!)

The Wisconsin Poet, Amy Welborn, and Bishop Daniel Flores of Detroit will be joining your humble Mr. Godsbody over at Inside Catholic next week for a spirited discussion of Exiles, Ron Hansen's new novel about Gerard Manley Hopkins and the wreck of the Deutschland. We're in the midst of the back and forth now. It'll run next week, and we're hoping that a host of informed, articulate readers will make up what is lacking in our commentary in the comments boxes. Which means you'll need to have read the thing. SO, on the off chance anybody's interested, this is a heads up... Hope to see you there!

Wall-E

Rod Dreher really liked Wall-E. (So did I, by the by.) Interestingly, First Son had precisely this same observation as we pulled out of the drive in:

"What I found especially interesting about this epilogue is how it showed the robots from the Axiom helping humans rebuild civilization. See, 'Wall-E' is not a Luddite film. It doesn't demonize technology. It only argues that technology is properly used to help humans cultivate their true nature -- that it must be subordinate to human flourishing, and help move that along. Where humanity got into trouble was allowing technology to exacerbate its own internal disorder -- to alienate people from their labor, from each other, and ultimately from themselves. The film is wise enough to know that we can't go back to a pre-technology state, so it says the best thing to do is to put technology in its proper place -- which we can only do when our own souls and communities are rightly ordered."

Via Amy.]

Battle Pope

Sure, it's sordid and irreverent. But it's always interesting to see what Catholicism inspires...

Reading can be fun!

Over at Doublethink, Joseph Bottum once published a perfectly charming short story entitled Melodrama. It does a good job of stepping out of itself here and there, which can be a tricky thing:

"Why is everyone so afraid of melodrama, when it happens to be true? Those old melodramatic plots had to come from somewhere. Poetic justice, the sense of an ending, a tale with a moral like the clicking shut of a well-made box: We don’t look for them in life because we found them in stories; we look for them in stories because we saw them first in life. Forget ambiguity. The entire universe wants a neat and happy conclusion. Creation is God’s own cliff-hanger, the Perils of Pauline in six hundred billion installments, played across the stars.

Susan Lark was young, pretty, and sufficiently inexperienced to be outraged by the suggestion that she was any less experienced than a combination of Mata Hari, Susan Sontag, and the absinthe-sodden madam of a New Orleans bordello. She worked for the administration of St. Aloysius University, in Washington, D.C., and she was engaged to a prig..."

Self-Portrait

Esquire

So a while back, I posted about my regret that I had once passed up a chance to buy the 1975 Esquire that featured Walker Percy's essay on bourbon (it was included in a collection of pieces on Great American Things). This magnificent human being then took it upon himself to purchase said issue for me, and it arrived the evening before my 35th. It's nothing short of fantastic; a testament to what magazines can be and once were and will most likely never be again. MFK Fisher on apple pie. Joan Didion on the shopping center. Julia Child on corn. Russell Baker on the flag. Andy Warhol on TV. Eudora Welty on the corner store. And much, much more. I'll post a few snippets in the coming days. But this is me on a Saturday getaway with The Wife in Julian, sitting on the porch as the sun goes down, and reading aloud great swaths of magnificent prose.

From Percy's bourbon essay, which I'm sure everybody here knows by heart:

"The pleasure of knocking back bourbon lies in the plane of the aesthetic but at the opposite pole from connoisseurship. My preference for the former is or is not deplorable depending on one's value systems - that is to say, how one balances out the Epicurean virtues of cultivating one's sensory end organs with the greatest discrimination and at least cost to one's health, against the virtue of evocation of time and memory and of the recovery of self and the past from the fogged-in disoriented Western world. In Kierkegaardian terms, the use of bourbon to such an end is a kind of aestheticized religious mode of existence, whereas connoisseurship, the discriminating but single-minded stimulation of sensory end-organs, is the aesthetic of damnation."

I CAN HAS PIE

35, halfway to the grave, but blissfully forgetful of that grim reality, thanks to the best apple pie The Wife has managed yet. And that's saying something.