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.

argh

argh

WHY IS THIS BLOG BROKEN

The Truth

My birthday is coming soon!

Feast

June 24 is the Feast of the Nativity of John the Baptist, my patron.

Payback

I will never be able to unsee Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The damage is done. But this helps to ease the pain a little. The language is very blue, but deep bitterness over the outraging of your childhood can have that effect.

[Via Goldenfiddle.]

The Problem

This, from an article about surprise bestseller The Shack

"Mr. Young, Mr. Cummings and Mr. Jacobsen worked for 16 months through four rewrites. Mr. Jacobsen then showed the manuscript to several publishers, but it was rejected everywhere — both by Christian publishers, who found it too controversial, and secular publishers, who thought it was too Christian."

Bam.

[Via Vulture]

Today in Porn, iPhone Edition

Thanks to the California Lawyer for the heads up. A few highlights:

"...now, thanks in large part to the iPhone's video dexterity, short clips are becoming a staple of the mobile porn business. The speed promised by the iPhone 2.0 is much anticipated. Google Trends, which measures Web buzz, shows a sharp increase over the past year in the popularity of the term 'iPhone porn.'"

...

"'It's by far the porn-friendliest phone,' says Devan Cypher, representative for San Francisco–based Sin City Entertainment. As evidence of the gadget's rocketing popularity in California's porn capital, the San Fernando Valley, numerous iPhone-specific porn sites have been launched in recent months."

[Devan Cypher? Best porn industry rep name ever.]

"Indeed, the new iPhone may eventually propel mobile porn deeper into the sphere of interactivity. Blogger Jason Swifter has already imagined one such scenario. 'I wish there was an application that allowed you to undress people by dragging your fingers across the screen and literally dragging it off,' he wrote on iPhonematters.com."

[Hope that works out for you, Jason. Because now that Time has run that quote of yours, I don't foresee you dragging off any non-virtual ladies' clothes anytime soon.]

Of course, this is not news 'round here. Almost three years ago, we noticed this line in the New York Times:

"Many of those in the business of pornography are not deterred by today's technical difficulties in delivering cellphone video. Harvey Kaplan, director of mobile operations for xobile.com, a company in Charlotte, N.C., that sells two-minute hard-core video clips for download over phones, said he believed that thirst for sex-related content would drive the popularity of Internet-enabled phones. 'People aren't going to go out and buy a cellphone that streams video so they can watch a trailer of a Disney movie,' he said. 'But they will buy that phone if they have five minutes of quiet time' viewing sexually explicit video."

"Five minutes of quiet time" is my new favorite euphemism.

Now I have to have another son.

If only to name him after Blessed Zenobius Kovalyk. A Russian martyr, crucified against the wall of a convent-turned-prison.

Zenobius Kovalyk Lickona. He would rule nations.

Scenes From My Home Town

Courtesy of Uncle Chad.

Into the Wild

Ernie and I head...well, you know.

Today in Porn, Adultery Edition

Things are hopping over at Ross Douthat's blog.

Hocus Pocus

Yours truly has a profile of Catholic magician Angelo Stagnaro in the current NCRegister. (Registration required.) Hoo!

Stories...

...simultaneously distracting us from death and pointing to its inevitably (THE END) since forever!

No! Stop paying attention!

Don't notice Mad Men! Turn off that media spotlight. You'll ruin it! I want just enough people to watch to keep the show on the air. At least, for one more season. Then it can blow up.