...

Dr. George Tiller has been shot and killed.

It's complicated.

Thanks to the New Mexico Nurse for passing along this story about a reporter/advocate who was, um, forcibly removed from anywhere near where the President might eventually be.

"Lee said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press that she wanted to hand Obama a letter urging him 'to take a stand for traditional marriage.' She said she asked a Secret Service agent to give the president her letter, but he refused and referred her to a White House staffer. Lee said she refused to give the staffer the letter. 'I said, "I'll take my chances if (the president) comes by here,"' said Lee, who identified herself as a Roman Catholic priestess who lives in Anaheim, Calif. 'He became annoyed that I wouldn't give him the letter.'"

To sum up: a Roman Catholic priestess from Anaheim who reports for the Georgia Informer got in trouble for trying to pass a note to the President asking him to oppose gay marriage.

From Raising Arizona:

"It's a crazy world."

"Someone oughtta sell tickets."

"I'd buy one."

Today in Porn, Theology of the Body Edition, Continued

Michael Waldstein and Janet Smith weigh in on West v. Schindler. Sounds like it's time for a symposium.

Bloody

So Gawker ran this photo of a bullfight protest in Spain. Dramatic, no? Now, just as a thought experiment, imagine it's an abortion protest.

Because, you know, Catholic Artists.

Daniel Mitsui, aka Mr. Medieval, is offering prints of what he considers his finest work to date* (see above) for $135.

Now, just in case that seems dear, here's an additional impetus. From Mitsui's blog: "My son, Benedict Amadeus Mitsui, is now more than a week old...Michelle started to have regular contractions on the afternoon of Sunday, May 3rd. Her labor lasted seventy-two hours, the first sixty unmedicated. After a final three hours of hard pushing, the doctors declared that the baby was showing signs of distress, and that a caesarian section was the only remaining option. Thusly our son was born, just after 4 o'clock on Wednesday afternoon, May 6th...It is likely, even with insurance my wife and I have, that the hospital bills for so difficult a delivery will destroy us financially. The one asset that I can hope to convert to money is artwork - and I have a lot of it. In the coming weeks, I will be posting several notices of sales on my existing artwork. If you have contacted me in the past about buying a drawing, only to find it too expensive, please contact me again. All prices are open to negotiation."

Think of it as an NPR fundraiser without all the tedious puffery. "For your donation of just $135, you receive this top-notch modern religious illustration - AND you help to support quality Catholic artists."

*Account of imagery here.

Today in Porn, Theology of the Body Edition

So Christopher West, who has built a career out of bringing John Paul II's Theology of the Body to the masses, made it onto Nightline, and said some things which he says were taken out of context. In particular:

"I actually see very profound historical connections between Hugh Hefner and John Paul II" - in particular, for the way each attempted to rescue sex from Victorian prudishness. "I love Hugh Hefner. I really do. Why? Because I think I understand his ache. I think I understand his longing because I feel it myself. There is this yearning, this ache, this longing we all have for love, for union, for intimacy."

Dr. Alice Von Hldebrand was not pleased, and spoke out against what she saw as West's loose-cannon approach. The sanctification of sex, she argued, implies “a humility, a spirit of reverence, and totally avoiding the vulgarity that he uses in his language...I’m shocked and horrified by the words that he uses. His mere mention of Hugh Hefner is to my mind an abomination.”

Now, David L. Schindler, Provost/Dean and Gagnon Professor of Fundamental Theology at the Pontifical Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family (and, if memory serves, something of a mentor to my sister-in-law Lisa), is weighing in:

"West presents a problem for the Church, not because he lacks orthodox intentions, but because his unquestionably orthodox intentions render his theology, a priori, all the more credible. His work often deflects people from the beauty and depth of what is the authentic meaning of John Paul II's anthropology of love, and thus of what was wrought in and through the Second Vatican Council. It is scarcely the first time in the history of the Church that abundant good will did not suffice to make one's theology and vision of reality altogether true."

Schindler's response is more nuanced and less shocked than Von Hildebrand's, and includes bits like this: "In the end, West, in his disproportionate emphasis on sex, promotes a pansexualist tendency that ties all important human and indeed supernatural activity back to sex without the necessary dissimilitudo."

I think it's good to see this kind of back-and-forth - why, it's almost like peer review! - and I look forward to West's responses.

Today in Porn, Literary Edition

Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses while sitting on a child's playground.

The Long and Winding Road

Okay, last bit on the Gooch bio of O'Connor, I promise. But Gooch himself is kind of a fascinating case, and if I were a rich Catholic editor, I'd send someone to chat with him. The story in his acknowledgements would make a fine jumping-off point.

By the time O'Connor's The Habit of Being came out in 1979, O'Connor was already Gooch's "favorite fiction writer." He was a Columbia grad student with a concentration in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, and detected in O'Connor "the subtle tug of a spiritual quest in a dark universe animated by grace and significance."

Gooch wrote to O'Connor's longtime friend and supporter Sally Fitzgerald, who had edited The Habit of Being, and proposed writing O'Connor's biography. Fitzgerald demurred, writing in reply that she was already working on a bio of her own. Disappointed, Gooch patiently waited for its publication. And waited. And then, "Sally Fitzgerald...died in June 2000, at the age of eighty-three, leaving behind an unfinished manuscript that has yet to appear." (Another story worth investigating...)

Gooch writes, "As my personal test for deciding on projects has always been to write the book I want to read but cannot find on the shelf, I could think of no better choice" than the O'Connor biography.

But in the meantime, Gooch wrote a bunch of other books that he couldn't find on the shelf. There were a bunch of gay-themed novels: Scary Kisses, The Golden Age of Promiscuity, and Zombie00. There were a couple of gay self-help books: Finding the Boyfriend Within: A Practical Guide for Tapping Into Your Own Source of Love, Happiness, and Respect and Dating the Greek Gods: Empowering Spiritual Messages on Sex and Love, Creativity and Wisdom. There was City Poet, his bio of gay poet Frank O'Hara. And of course, there was Godtalk: Travels in Spiritual America.

So yeah - it's interesting to note that two of O'Connor's dear friends were women who found women attractive, and it is not particularly surprising or bothersome that Gooch would choose to highlight such things. (As a Catholic, I would likely have focused more on her experience of faith and the development of her theology.) But I think Gooch would be happy to acknowledge that the subject of his most recent biography, were she alive today, would very likely find in his earlier material grist for her particular fictional mill. Spiritual meanderings? Finding the boyfriend within? Empowering messages on creativity? A story about a young man who seeks to become a zombie and subjects himself to the sexual sadism of various masters? This is pitching to O'Connor's wheelhouse. I would be very interested to hear Gooch's own thoughts on the matter.

Exhausted.

That was the word that came to mind while reading this essay by Joyce Carol Oates about Flannery O'Connor. Oates slogs her way through an account of O'Connor's life and work (in particular, as presented by biographer Brad Gooch), dwelling as much (or moreso) on matters sexual as Gooch himself. But then, at the end, we get to the Point of Things, as Oates shifts from first to fifth gear and jams down on the accelerator:

"Is the art of caricature a lesser or secondary art, set beside what we might call the art of complexity or subtlety? Is 'cartoon' art invariably inferior to 'realist' art? The caricaturist has the advantage of being cruel, crude, reductive, and often very funny; as the 'realist' struggles to establish the trompe l'oeil of verisimilitude, without which the art of realism has little power to persuade, the caricaturist wields a hammer, or an ax, or sprays the target with machine-gun fire, transmuting what might be rage—the savage indignation of Jonathan Swift, for instance—into devastating humor. Satire is the weapon of rectitude, a way of meting out punishment. Satire regrets nothing, and revels in unfairness in its depiction of what Flannery O'Connor called 'large and startling figures.' It isn't surprising to learn that O'Connor began her career as a creative artist by drawing cartoons in mockery of human fatuousness and frailty or that her earliest efforts were satirical pieces...Not the shimmering multidimensionality of modernism but the two-dimensionality of cartoon art is at the heart of the work of O'Connor, whose unshakable absolutist faith provided her with a rationale with which to mock both her secular and bigoted Christian contemporaries in a succession of brilliantly orchestrated short stories that read like parables of human folly confronted by mortality."

But seriously, Ms. Oates, tell us how you really feel. And never mind O'Connor's oft-repeated dictum that the artist is bound, first and foremost, by the reality which he actually sees before him.

Cool San Diego

Taken last night as I drove along El Cajon Boulevard.

Trader Joe's had a sale.

Margarita season comes early this year.

Sigh.

So the trailer for the new Sherlock Holmes movie almost made me sad.



But then I remembered this excellent article on movie marketing I read in a copy of The New Yorker I found on the ground in a mall parking lot:

"The collective wisdom is that young males like explosions, blood, cars flying through the air, pratfalls, poop jokes, 'you’re so gay' banter, and sex—but not romance. Young women like friendship, pop music, fashion, sarcasm, sensitive boys who think with their hearts, and romance—but not sex (though they like to hear the naughty girl telling her friends about it). They go to horror films as much as young men, but they hate gore; you lure them by having the ingénue take her time walking down the dark hall.

"Older women like feel-good films and Nicholas Sparks-style weepies: they are the core audience for stories of doomed love and triumphs of the human spirit. They enjoy seeing an older woman having her pick of men; they hate seeing a child in danger. Particularly once they reach thirty, these women are the most 'review-sensitive': a chorus of critical praise for a movie aimed at older women can increase the opening weekend’s gross by five million dollars. In other words, older women are discriminating, which is why so few films are made for them.

"Older men like darker films, classic genres such as Westerns and war movies, men protecting their homes, and men behaving like idiots. Older men are easy to please, particularly if a film stars Clint Eastwood and is about guys just like them, but they’re hard to motivate. 'Guys only get off their couches twice a year, to go to ‘Wild Hogs’ or ‘3:10 to Yuma,’ ' the marketing consultant Terry Press says. 'If all you have is older males, it’s time to take a pill.'"

And there it is.

The Way of Combat

Observe:



Assess:



Attack:

"It only ends once; everything else is progress."

That's from Jacob in the season finale of Lost. Given this attitude, it is of course no surprise to see him reading Flannery O'Connor's Everything that Rises Must Converge, a collection named from a phrase coined by the Jesuit thinker Teilhard de Chardin, who envisioned all of creation as evolving toward the divine. First Sawyer reading Percy's Lancelot, now this. Somebody's been reading their way around the Catholic Book Club.

And of course, Ben's confrontation with Jacob was classic Job raging at God. "What about me?" "What about you?" Except for the stabbing part. It's hard to stab God.

Bottum on Notre Dame

Here, and here, and here.

This is worth considering: "Abortion is not the only life issue, but it is the one that bears most directly on the lives of ordinary Catholics as they swim against the current to preserve family life. And until Catholic universities understand this, they will not be Catholic--in a very real, existential sense."

Bookmark

"I am worried about him."

"Why?"

"Frankly, I'm afraid he might be on the verge of some disastrous religious conversion."

I was jarred. "Really?" I said.

"I've seen this happen before. And I can think of no other reason for this sudden interest in ethics. Not that Edmund is profligate, but really, he's one of the least morally concerned boys I've ever known. I was very startled when he began to question me - in all earnestness - about such hazy concerns as Sin and Forgiveness. He's thinking of going into the Church, I just know it. Perhaps that girl has something to do with it, do you suppose...Is she a Catholic?"

"I think she's Presbyterian," I said. Julian had a polite but implacable contempt for Judeo-Christian tradition in virtually all its forms. He would deny this if confronted, citing evasively his affection for Dante and Giotto, but anything overtly religious filled him with a pagan alarm; and I believe that like Pliny, whom he resembled in so many respects, he secretly thought it to be a degenerate cult carried to extravagant lengths.

"A Presbyterian? Really?" he said, dismayed.

"I believe so."

"Well, whatever one thinks of the Roman Church, it is a worthy and powerful foe. I could accept that sort of conversion with grace. But I shall be very disappointed indeed if we lose him to the Presbyterians."

- a passage that has stayed with me from Donna Tartt's The Secret History

Generation X: Origins

Pause a moment, won't you, and consider this comment on a Movieline story about how Barbarella ain't gonna get remade after all, despite Robert Rodriguez's devotion to new(ish) muse Rose McGowan:

"I was conceived to Barbarella. Calgary drive in. Late summer, 1969. Broken French condom."

What an extraordinary thing to know about one's own beginnings.

I read a book!

Lots of thoughts still coalescing after actually reading a book, Brad Gooch's Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor. But the most visceral is this: if'n I were an artistic-type person, I'd write me a short story around this sentence regarding her story collection A Good Man is Hard to Find (a collection which included the devastating "Good Country People"):

"Its inevitable fate was the thirty-five-cent paperback, published by Signet the next year in a run of 173,750 copies, with a lurid cover of Hulga, in an open blouse and red skirt, her leg and foot bare, struggling in a hayloft with a dark stranger."

Google Images gives me nothing, but wow this is great material. The story, naturally, is about the painter, a guy who routinely has to tart up works of literary fiction to make 'em look sexy for the masses. And then he gets handed this weird story collection, and starts perusing, looking for his subject...

Might just have to write this one.

Why are you here?

When you could be watching Darkon on Hulu? Seriously well-done documentary on fantasy role-players - i.e., folks who have created a culture amid the wastelands of their modern lives. "None of our wars are just another war. Every one is different, unique, and worthy of stories, and songs, and lies after the fact. They'll all be enshrined in our history."

And there's this, from the end: "It's all terminal. We're gonna die. And maybe fantasy and religion and all those things are, if not crutches, vehicles that get you from birth to death. I think that the people who get the most out of life are those that have a rich fantasy world. It's part of what allows people to hope."

But as awesome as the Darkon people are,* the really amazing thing is the filmmaking, the incisive movement deeper into the dynamic of a fantasy world populated by real people. Not mocking, not lauding, but looking, and looking closely.

*No, this does not imply that I long to number myself among their ranks.

Twelve

Man, I am old. Longtime readers will agree: this blog owes much to First Son's wit.

It was Lent.

That's the only reason I can imagine for my failure to see this awesome story, kindly passed along by the New Mexico Nurse:

"Thomas Vought and colleagues at Kansas State University devised indexes for sloth, gluttony, lust, greed, wrath, envy and pride ... Sloth was based on spending per capita on arts and entertainment compared to the employment rate, gluttony on fast-food outlets per capita, lust on rates of sexually transmitted disease, greed on average incomes compared to the number of people living below the poverty line, wrath on violent crimes per capita and envy on property crimes. The researchers decided that pride is the master sin and therefore merged the rates of the lesser sins."

The real fun, of course, lies in charting the overlaps.

The Wife took a look and said, "Obviously flawed. The sloth index should have a bright red dot on OUR HOUSE."

I don't know what she's talking about.

Writers' Rooms: Andrew McNabb

Andrew McNabb is the author of The Body of This: Stories, a book you should buy, and even read. Today, he joins the illustrious company of writers who have offered some glimpse of their workspace on this blog. Andrew writes:

Nearly a year ago to the day, The Wisconsin Poet wrote a heartfelt and inspired piece about his writing space. I am incapable of being so profound. I do have this to say about my space—it’s as far away from the kids as I could get it. We live in a big, old Victorian home in the West End of Portland [Maine], and there are three floors to the house. When we moved in a few years ago, my office was on the first floor. There was no lock on the door. Bad idea. After a year of frustration, we played musical rooms over one weekend and I ended up with a great space on the third floor with a great view.



But this is what happened when I attempted to install a lock on the door.



The missing molding is the result of my incompetence as a carpenter, not from little hands beating the door down to find their beloved Dad. And finally, next to my computer I keep handy the sources of all my inspiration.



(By which, we can only assume he means The Bible and rejection letters from Commonweal.)

Why are you here?

When you could be here, watching The Hunt for Gollum (trailer above)? "Created by fans of JRR Tolkein, this is an unofficial short film set in Middle Earth which depicts events leading up to The Fellowship of the Ring..."

Listen.

Look. If I can forgive Andrew McNabb for writing a story like "The Architecture of Things" before I did, then you can skip over to Catholic Radio International and listen to The Wisconsin Poet read the thing on Cover to Cover. And while you're there, you can listen to the man himself chat with ol' JOB (and again with CRI head man Jeff Gardner on The Heart of the Matter), as he addresses some of the hullaballoo over in the comments box at Inside Catholic over his story story collection The Body of This. And if by then you still haven't broken down and ordered a copy, then you can tune back in to Cover to Cover tonight and listen to Yours Truly bloviate over and around the insightful points made by JOB and Dappled Things Editor in Chief Katy Carl. Hoo!