Today in Porn, "How Could You Do This To Me?" Edition.

The Wisconsin Poet sends in this gem from his own neck of the woods. (Alert: the language gets a little blue.) The Police Report keeps the prose nice and dry: "On 07-14-09 Rachel came home from work and found her boyfriend, Christopher, masturbating and watching pornographic movies on the TV. A verbal altercation ensued until Rachel took a knife out of the kitchen drawer. Rachel stabbed Christopher in the abdomen, slashed both of his arms, and scratched him on the neck and his right nipple. Christopher left the apartment and sought medical attention at GLMC."

Money quote from Rachel: "You #@!*ing cheater! How could you do this to me? I let you live here!"

What?

My brother was in town this weekend.

[weeps]

Coming soon: The Magdalena: the movie. Because The Magdalena: the comic book was not big enough to hold all the goodness. From Wiki:

"After the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ, Mary Magdalene, reputed to be his wife, gave birth to a daughter, Sarah. From this child is descended the holy lineage of the Magdalena. The Magdelena serves as the warrior and protector of the Catholic Church. The Magdalena has the ability to see into the human heart, to show people the error of their ways and give them the choice to redeem their sins. There is only one in a generation, and she alone stands against the evils of the world. Magdalena wields the Spear of Destiny, the spear that pierced the side of Christ, as a holy and formidable weapon against the twisted and the evil."

I have got to figure out how to get me a piece of the Godsploitation action.

Alphonse issue two is funded.

Made it, and with five days to spare. I am humbled by and grateful for the support, and will do my durnedest to make something good from it. Production starts next week.

I wrote a story!

Oooh, fashion!

Today in Porn, Margaret Sanger, Founder of Planned Parenthood Edition

The American Catholic has unearthed a fine trove of Sanger quotations, including this gem:

"In my experience as a trained nurse while attending persons afflicted with various and often revolting diseases, no matter what their ailments, I have never found any one so repulsive as the chronic masturbator. It would be difficult not to fill page upon page of heartrending confessions made by young girls, whose lives were blighted by this pernicious habit, always begun so innocently, for even after they have ceased the habit, they find themselves incapable of any relief in the natural act. [...] Perhaps the greatest physical danger to the chronic masturbator is the inability to perform the sexual act naturally.

In the boy or girl past puberty, we find one of the most dangerous forms of masturbation, i.e., mental masturbation, which consists of forming mental pictures, or thinking obscene or voluptuous pictures. This form is considered especially harmful to the brain, for the habit becomes so fixed that it is almost impossible to free the thoughts from lustful pictures."

I think I may rename Today in Porn as Today in Lustful Pictures.

Hello.

First Son, age twelve: "I understand why guys like girls. But why do girls like guys?"

Hello.

From Second Daughter, age three: "Daddy, when I go to sleep, I disappear. Then when I wake up, I come back."

New Dappled Things

Well, now. The good people at Dappled Things have a new issue out, and it looks to be a fine one. Naturally, they start out with a poem from The Wisconsin Poet, and then use his mention of skeletal cathedrals to segue into this illustrated essay by architect Matthew Alderman on the project that won him the Rambusch Prize for Sacred Architecture, a never-to-be-built(?) seminary for the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest in, of all places, La Crosse, Wisconsin. A snippet:

"I have retained my old loves, but added new ones—a deep interest in the later Gothic revival, an occasional taste for art deco, an eagerness to take on the austere and simple, when reality necessarily intrudes. But I would have never gotten here had I not first tackled this grand paper project. Architectural decorum reminds us that a grand building requires grand ornament—something I still firmly believe—but grand ornament requires funding that is not always at hand. To design a beautiful, strong, and simple structure, you must design a beautiful, strong, and complex one first, and then carefully, gently, and logically remove all the bits reality cannot quite handle yet. This is how you pack as much as you can into as little as you may have been given. The simplicity of the California missions could not have blossomed without the exuberance of Mexico’s cathedrals before it. And we may yet have that glorious, busy exuberance in small doses, as the classical revival continues to grow outward and upward, as the Institute brings Baroque Rome to Chicago, or converted Anglicans plant English Gothic parishes in Texas."

But wait, there's more! Dappled Things President Bernardo Aparicio and EIC Katy Carl interview Carlos Eire, whose memoir Waiting for Snow in Havana won the Pulitzer Prize:

KC: What would you say to the (presumably Catholic) reader who might be put off by the repetition of “Jesus H. (adjective here) Christ”? It seems that there is a highly specific purpose in these repetitions, and that they are not intended to be irreverent—that you had a purpose so strong that it compelled you to take the risk of being read as irreverent. Can you talk about that?

CE: That’s the Jesus prayer, pure and simple. I’m hoping, in a very jesuitical way, to—as St. Ignatius of Loyola would say—to go fishing. He used to go “fishing for souls”—that’s what he would call it. He would go [out] and he’d corral people on the street and try to talk to them in their own language, and he’d sometimes start by being irreverent to hook them in. Fishing for souls. I had that very much in mind with “Jesus H.” There’s a way in which this is the ultimate irony—that people in our culture have this very brittle, extremely brittle, notion of Jesus as totally serious and totally serious about himself—which I think is so wrong, so utterly wrong. All you have to do is look at a crucifix and you realize, “My God, this is a reversal of all values.” . . . If God became a human being to suffer and be like us, it’s because there’s something so wrong here that needs to be fixed. It’s the ultimate emptying, kenosis—and that has to be taken so seriously. So if I joke about Jesus in a lighthearted way, it’s not out of irreverence, it’s out of the deepest possible reverence, hoping that in the same way as the Incarnation—against reason—it might actually get the message across to someone who doesn’t like Christianity. That there’s something in there that accepts the humor and the mocking and the self-abasement. What such people think Christianity is all about is the church lady on Saturday Night Live. I wanted to go the opposite direction from the church lady. (laughs) I may actually at some point do a book called “Jesus H.” It’ll be sort of a meditation on the passages of the Gospels with all the most ridiculous things Jesus does. Jesus H. Fish-eating Christ. Jesus H. Whip-making Christ. All these things that Jesus does that are somehow bizarre.

Alphonse in the news.

Interview is up over at The American Catholic. Many thanks to Darwin Catholic for the interest.

Q: Though I don’t want to overplay the evangelization aspect of this (who was it who said, “If you want to send a message, use Western Union”?) but what do you want people to come away from Alphonse with — but as a Catholic and as an author more generally?

A: My fondest hope is that this is a story that will linger in the reader’s mind after he or she has finished it and walked away.

I could say that I’d like it to give readers an enlarged sense of the world, but that’s awfully hifalutin.

I could say that I’d like it to give readers on both sides a better sense of the opposition – and if the characters are actually characters, as opposed to cardboard cutouts; if the story really is a story, as opposed to propaganda, then it’s certainly possible it will have that effect. But that’s more of a byproduct. It’s not why I’m doing this.

So I’ll stick with the lingering.

*****

In other news: 10 days remaining over at Kickstarter. We might just make it.

Today in Porn, No Seriously, My Work is Finished Edition

JOB passes along this World of Warcraft-themed ditty, "The Internet is for Porn." Language advisory, etc.

Catholic Fiction?

Commonweal, which my Dad used to read with great interest back when he was a fiery undergraduate at Siena College (publishing an underground newspaper, no less!), and which no doubt deserves praise that is both less faint and more recent than that, is returning to its old practice of publishing short fiction in its pages. They got Alice McDermott! And to celebrate, they're putting it up online for free!

Alphonse in the news.

Story up over at Catholic News Agency. They asked me about the violence:

He acknowledged that there “are limits to what is helpful to show in art,” and that “there are levels of graphic violence that do a disservice to the story by removing the readers from the story and plunging them into awareness of their own revulsion.”

“Some people thought The Passion of the Christ crossed a line. Others did not. Alphonse is a lot less bloody than The Passion, but it is not bloodless. It's a visceral subject,” Lickona responded.

“I did my best to have the violence in Alphonse serve the story, and many people whose judgment I trust think I managed to do it. Others may disagree. All I can say is that I'm not out to rub anybody's face in the muck.”

Today in Porn, My Work is Finished Edition

Wearily, your Today in Porn correspondent braced himself to make note of the latest porny tidbit in the New York Times... and then he read, over at The Awl, Alex Balk's take on the same piece. And he sighed with relief - the job's been done. Content advisory, etc.

I wrote a story!

First Son is going to be so pleased to hear that so celebrated a cartoonist as Gahan Wilson had the same idea he did. Explanation here

Mariette in Ecstasy on Catholic Radio International

Joseph O'Brien reads Ron Hansen's masterful novel here. It's the sort of novel that benefits from being read aloud - really, really gorgeous language. And a pretty fine meditation on faith.

What Happened?

While in his mid-thirties, Mel Gibson, a Catholic who had once considered the priesthood but had instead become a wildly successful movie star, found himself in a dark place. From his account: "But when you get to that point where you don't want to live, and you don't want to die -- it's a desperate, horrible place to be. And I just hit my knees. And I had to use the Passion of Christ and wounds to heal my wounds. And I've just been meditating on it for twelve years.”

One result of that meditation was 2004's The Passion of the Christ, a film, according to co-screenwriter Benedict Fitzgerald, that Gibson said he was making as "a gift to his faith." There was considerable controversy surrounding the film (see above link to Peter Boyer's masterful New Yorker article on the matter), but it went on to succeed beyond everyone's expectations, grossing over $600 million worldwide.

What happened next hardly needs rehashing, but here it is in brief: in 2006, an intoxicated Gibson was pulled over for drunk driving. In dealing with the police, he said a bunch of stupid things, including some stupid things about Jews, which helped confirm the popular suspicion that he was an anti-Semite. Then, earlier this year, he confirmed that he was divorcing his wife of 18 years, and that he had taken up with a Russian musician, with whom he was expecting a child. It turned out that he had been effectively separated from his wife for three years. That takes us back to 2006.

Oh, and there was that lawsuit Fitzgerald filed against Gibson.

So, why hash all this out? Because Godsbody is damned curious about Gibson's current opinion of/experience of his faith. From the outside, it looks like he made the great religious statement of his artistic career, and everything went to hell. A look at his Wikipedia page makes it clear that he is comfortable being forthright in interviews. Will someone please ask him about this?

Status Report: $2,035!

Almost halfway there on Alphonse over at Kickstarter. Thanks so much to everyone who donated. Twenty-four days to go!

Fireworks

As I get older (not that I'm all that old, but still), I find myself less and less inclined to sound off on matters theological, and more inclined to work on the whole "ponder in one's heart" level. And this is so goopy as to border on childish, but what the hey, it came to me yesterday: the Incarnation was about love overcoming death, death brought on by sin. I have, in the past, opined that this is part of the reason why religion is often not all that significant to children, who lack a profound understanding of either sin or death.

But that, of course, is not the whole story. Death reigns throughout many aspects of life - in every meanness, in every unkindness, in every petty, stupid, selfish, deceitful, mendacious, evil act. And the Incarnation is about love overcoming the reign of death in every instance- binding up every wound, healing every rift, correcting every wicked impulse, helping the self to forget the self for love's sake again and again and again. The last enemy - death itself - is the flashpoint where the Incarnation has its great impact, but then it radiates through all creation.

My initial image for this was a Bible illustration done by Salvador Dali - an image from the Last Supper. Not the famous Dali Last Supper, but a wild, late-period image of Christ bearing the bread aloft, and rays of gold shooting off in all directions from the bread. I saw this image only once, as a teenager, and have not been able to find it since. But you know - fireworks work, too.

stories

Look, nobody reads this blog. Nobody reads, period. Said grumpy blogger man who nobody reads. But I was at a dinner tonight where the host asked, "What is your favorite story?" An excellent question. Anyone?