Discovering new tricks

Hey, TMB ...

Now you'll no longer have to wonder what I mean by the PMS Media ...

... or be mystified when I refer to a quondam blogroach as a PHD.

the Aww-skizz
my utterly unreliable & uninformed predictions on the big six categories

Pic : Gangs
Director : Polanski
Actor & Actress : Cage, Kidman
Supporting : Cooper, Zeta-Jones

we are all of us in the gutter

some of us are lookin' at the stars ...

Just testing

my ability to create an LRJTEA.

Many thanks to the FWTMHTDI !!

Festinate omnes, et videte meliora !!
Hasten ye all and see the better things

Mr O'Rama gives us some excellent quotations from Cardinal Ratzinger this day, on the Eucharist and on our Lady.

Seventeenth-century devotion

And first O Lord I praise and magnify thy name
For the Most Holy Virgin-Mother of God, who is the Highest of thy Saints.
The most Glorious of all thy Creatures.
The most Perfect of all thy Works.
The nearest unto Thee, in the Throne of God.

Whom Thou didst please to make
Daughter of the Eternal Father.
Mother of the Eternal Son.
Spouse of the Eternal Spirit.
Tabernacle of the Most Glorious Trinity.
Mother of Jesus.
Mother of the Messias.
Mother of Him who was the Desire of all Nations.
Mother of the Prince of Peace.
Mother of the King of Heaven.
Mother of our Creator.
Mother and Virgin.
Mirror of Humility and Obedience.
Mirror of Wisdom and Devotion.
Mirror of Modesty and Chastity.
Mirror of Sweetness and Resignation.
Mirror of Sanctity.
Mirror of all virtues.
The Most Illustrious Light in the Church,
    Wearing over all her Beauties the Veil of Humility
    to shine the more resplendently in thy Eternal Glory.

And yet this Holy Virgin-Mother styled herself but the Handmaid of the Lord, and falls down with all the Glorious Hosts of Angels, and with the Armies of Saints, at the foot of Thy Throne, to worship and Glorify Thee for ever and ever.

I praise thee O Lord with all the Powers and faculties of my Soul; for doing in Her all thy Merciful Works for my sake and the Benefit of Mankind. For uttering the Glorious Word: yea rather Blessed are they that Hear the Word of God, and Keep it. And for looking round about upon Thy Disciples and saying, Behold my Mother and my Brethren. For whosoever shall do the Will of God, the same is my Brother and my Sister and my Mother. Yea for what thou wilt say, Inasmuch as ye have done it to the least of these, ye have done it unto me.

The most unworthy of all thy Servants falleth down to worship Thee for thine own Excellencies; even Thee O Lord, for thine own perfection, and for all those Glorious Graces, given and imparted to this Holy Virgin, and to all thy Saints.

Thomas Traherne (1637-74), as quoted by A. M. Allchin in The Joy of All Creation : An Anglican Meditation on the Place of Mary (Cowley Publications, 1984), pp. 86-87.

Neuhaus

I must resume reading his book on the Seven Last Words, Death on a Friday Afternoon. I notice, in skipping idly ahead of where I left off, that the reader is given the Testament of Dom Christian de Chergé, one of the seven Trappist monks slain at Tibhirine, Algeria in 1996.

It sounds like faint praise to say so, but it is not meant as such. This book is excellent reading for a hospital waiting-room. Perhaps even in the jury-duty waiting room. Heck, it's Fr Neuhaus -- it's excellent reading for anywhere!

One Times One

It is axiomatic that no 60-page paperback is worth $12. plus tax. But when the paperback in question comtains 54 poems by Estlin Cummings, and most of them of immortal importance, we begin to wonder. One Times One, the book that Marianne Moore termed "the E. E. Cummings book of masterpieces" has been reissued by Liveright.

In this volume, there are many marvels, of the denunciatory, the natural, the amatory, the celebratory. Many of his best poems -- and best, not merely because they're metrical.

"what if a much of a which of a wind"
"except in your / honour"
"yes is a pleasant country"
"if everything happens that can't be done"
"nothing false and possible is love"
"life is more true than reason will deceive"
"one's not half two. It's two are halves of one"
"o by the by"
"true lovers in each happening of their hearts"
"a politician is an arse upon"
"a salesman is an it that stinks Excuse"
"all ignorance toboggans into know"
"i've come to ask you if there isn't a"
"no man,if men are gods;but if gods must"

(The one about the politician is a couplet, whose lower half is "which everyone has sat except a man" ...)

If you've ever wondered what the fuss is about Cummings, go into the bookstore and, at the very least, leaf slowly through One Times One.

BTW, TMB ...
TMB stands here for "The Mighty Barrister," not for "Third Millennium Bible"

I hope you're not superstitious! Specifically, I hope you're not triskaidekaphobic. Your "Vermont is in Canada, eh?" comment from a few days back was comment #1313 on dylan's haloscan.

You also have comment #1414. What is it with these multiples of 101?

John Cardinal Wright
from "Faith and the Theologies"

Theologians are men : the thoughts of men are many and divided. Theological theories set forth aspects, elements, corollaries of the faith. They provide reasonings about the faith. But theologians are not sources of faith nor are their speculations the object of faith.

Jesus Christ is God. The thought of God is one and unites; God's revelations are the object of faith. His Church authoritatively sets forth God's revelation. The Church is not a forum nor a school of theologians and theologies, though she is greatly helped by these in the total work of explaining the faith that she is called to do. The Church is the channel through which God's revelation reaches men, including theologians, so that believers may enjoy the privilege of reflecting on the content of revelation, as do theologians, but may also, and above all else, live in the light of the revelation -- as must all the faithful, including the theologians. Only what the Church teaches authoritatively as the mind and the will of Christ the Lord is the object of faith; all the theologies, even those which most she welcomes as helpful in understanding the faith or blesses as most consistent with the content of faith are secondary and marginal, related to the faith, perhaps, but not to be confused with it.

John Cardinal Wright in The Church : Hope of the World, ed. by Rev. Donald W. Wuerl (Kenosha : Prow Books, 1972), pp. 44-45.

Fulfilled the Sunday obligation

to watch the midday news yesterday. It is an obligation which we are disinclined to shirk.

Even when the news of the world, or of this part of the world, is more than mildly distressing, there is nonetheless an incentive to stay adequately informed on the issues and events of the day.

What cocktail am I?

The gimlet. Go anywhere else for the link to the quiz.

He wasn't standing up, he was laying down

Fred Reed on the "enstupidation" of America, the deliberate cultivation, the active encouragement, of semi-literacy.

The header to this post was a line of dialogue in a recent episode of CSI. And even though I went to a high-school (grades seven through twelve) that taught English grammar very well, and taught Latin as a non-elective, and taught modern foreign languages, I was in the tenth grade before I learned the difference between "lie" and "lay."

Of course, that prayer is the culprit. "Now I lay me down to sleep." Which means, "Now, I place myself down to sleep." Which also means, "Now I lie down." Lay : transitive, to place something down. Lie : intransitive, to recline.

Of course, there are other meanings of "lie" (and of "lay") which we shall avoid discussing, for the nonce.

Go read Reed!

Jeff Miller has returned

as The Curt Jester.

And he asks for our prayers for his mother, who died yesterday morning. Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord, and may the perpetual light shine upon her. May she rest in peace.

:: :: :: :: ::

Non solum ... sed etiam ...

The Gospel M*I*N*E*F*I*E*L*D, Kathy the Carmelite's new weblog, has also been added to Places Oft.

Joe Fitzgerald

writes today that violence comes not from the presence of guns but from the absence of values.

I'd add, too, the reluctance to give sentences that are proportionate to the gravity of the crime.

But an excellent column : read the words of the shooting victim who indicts "not the bullet, but the attitude that fired the gun." Precisely.

But that insight is often obscured for reasons that are less morally than politically correct.

When white folks shoot black folks, we blame the shooters. When black folks shoot black folks, we blame the guns. And who pays the price for this reluctance to assign culpability? Not people who are living in Winchester or Wellesley.

The first two homicide victims in Boston in 2003 were both black children under the age of 15, the most recent a child in his ninth month in the womb.

Vocative

"Teach me the word
That will conquer the world,
Will plunder, will lay waste,
Dominions of the dull
And kingdoms of the bad."

Silence is learning
Submission to heaven,
Grace's receiving,
Kinesis and virtue
And works of the good.

"Teach me the silence
That will conquer false speech,
Will betray and will scatter
The legions of the proud,
The chattering cheaters."

The holy and honest
Speak little and wisely,
Composed of a faith
That keeps them in concord,
Silent or singing.

© 2000, 2003 by dylan_tm618

Corrections

Memorandum to all departments. Do we know the difference between a doily and a mantilla? Can we see on the left, the Clare Boothe Luce cravat, and on the right, the Henry Wallace foulard?

The snow has stopped failing. It continues to sit on the curb, parked under the lamppost. Gregarious, Gregorian, it greets the passing stranger with a sunny smile. Not unlike a social-studies teacher en l'an trentiesme de son eage.

The psalters and their psalmodists grimace at the antics of the Musikführerin. You will be tolerant. You will get your facts straight. This is a foreboding.

Thou shalt not compare Episcopalians to Unitarians. Thou shalt not declare dissenters un-dandy. Thou shalt praise the ghost of Chicago. Thou shalt read official documents and practice fine distinctions. Thou shalt genuflect to polyglots. Thou shalt learn the meaning of "symbol." Thou shalt find the thread to be puzzling.

You can call him the Rev. Al

or you can call him what Peter Beinart of the Jewish World Review calls him. With words that are bracingly unminced.

Vescovabile

A friend of mine, who lives in proximity to a fairly big-name college, recently proferred his opinion that his pastor, la personalité des toutes personalités, was bishop material. The priest in question is about 60, and it probably would have happened by now if it was going to happen at all.

First time I met this shepherd, my friend introduces me by name and location -- a few miles from the parish, not all that far. With more suspicion than curiosity, Monsignor asked, "Well, what are you doing here?" (The perfect response would have been, "Lowering property values.")

My choice for a vescovabile priest is only 34. He shows forth the good Lord Christ as efficaciously and as splendidly as a monstrance. And if it's not his lot to be a bishop, my prayer is that we have bishops like him. He possesses a good-humored orthodoxy, as attractive as it is unapologetic.

I'm not sure

there are too many John Ashbery fans here, and I'm not sure I'm quite an Ashbery "fan" (used to idolize the poet, then turned violently against him, and now I just tolerate him as one of the quirkier and odder literary phenomena out there), BUT

I'm thinking of linking to an interview with Ashbery where he confesses that one of his poems ("The Songs We Know Best" in A Wave) was written to the tune of Peaches & Herb's "Reunited" !!

But that's perhaps the only fun part of the interview. Plus, I don't want to encourage reading of a poet whom I describe as a guilty pleasure. It is a poetry of startlement, but after a while, you begin to expect the startling, and the glee diminishes and the attraction wanes. Still, he'll give you something chuckleworthy every once in a blue moon : "The oxymoron gets his rocks off."

Obstat Eireann

TSO : Shane, not Shawn !!

Gaudeamus igitur !!

Let there be sung Non nobis and Te Deum !!

She's being discharged from the hospital as we speak !! Huzzah !! (And she is, her husband reports, doing much better.)

Thank you, Lord, and thank you, St Luke, and thank you, nuestra Señora, and thank you all who prayed !!

Bad Weather

(being a mad scholastic misadventure in painfully correct rhyme) 


It snowed like history in the ears;
The cats and dogs were howling for years.

A timeless airplane once split a rock,
Crashed on the runway at twelve o'clock.

A glacier struck at quarter of two.
A most formal Ice Age did ensue

By hexagonal law. Convention
Yields to the solstice of creation.

It snowed in the mind like chemistry.
The cats and dogs strained their eyes to see

The arctic lips of Art and Reason
In this kaleidoscopic season.

To kiss the shore was intense. Waves, black,
Mounted the snowy sand, left no track,

Quoted bleak surahs, then sighed slow. Their
Sibilance fractured the coastal air.

It snowed like algebra, graphed the earth.
The cats and dogs factored the rebirth

Of blood-spilling skin-breaking despair.
Conic-sectioned snowdrifts killed the air.

Analphabetic veins, intertwined,
Stifled light in the subtracted mind.

Then came a stasis : cranial fright
And heartless vocals. The whole numb night,

It snowed. I cried. Your marble-white face
Was cold in its smooth declining grace.


first version 1986
revised 2003

What poetic form are you?
Link to the quiz. Watch those pop-ups!

... and note the deliberate absence of the graphic, because when those pictures don't come up, the text within the picture nonetheless still does, in the red-Xed rectangle, as one immensely long line that throws the template out of whack ...

I know I should be telling you that I'm
A rubai - but perhaps some other time.
It sounds like work, and anyway, it's late -
Unless I sleep, I'll be too tired to rhyme.

Besides, there's plates to clear and cups to clink,
And when that's done I have to sit and think,
Since then it won't be long before I need
To sleep again and eat again and drink.

(If you were not a Rubai you would be Blank Verse.)

:: :: :: :: ::

A jug of bread, a loaf of wine, and I --
I followed the rhyme scheme less travelled by,
FitzGerald's in his Khayyam rendering,
The third line just a little bit awry.

Exactly

From William F. Buckley's latest column :

I have a copy of a private communication. It is written by a close student of rhetoric, and the author writes, "George Bush is a phenomenon: he is the innately nonverbally apt, or deft, speaker who transcends eloquence, [nevertheless] achieving that which is greater in oratory — a plainspoken integrity that unites the emotions and the intellect." Bush replaces, the analyst continues, "mere eloquence with genuine conviction, character, moral courage, and personal goodness."

Prayers, please, for a friend

in hospital. Appendix out, & one other problem.

Perhaps it would fitting to ask the intercession of St Luke, physician and evangelist, that when she asks for medication to deal with pain, she might get it within five minutes, not five hours, of making the request.

William Topaz McGonagall, poet and tragedian of Dundee, has been widely hailed as the writer of the worst poetry in the English language.

I may have to add this to Places Oft. See for yourself if the assessment of his opus is justly pronounced.

ALL ARE WELCOME

I'm thinking of translating the phrase above (currently plastered on every door of the Franciscan shrine here in Boston) into something that resembles the language of honesty. It might take a whole paragraph. Can anyone do it in 20 words or less?

J. Bottum at the Standard

on the poets vs the First Lady. A bit long, jeeyust a bit, this piece, but generally right on target.

Andy Borowitz at JWR

on the French, who remain unconvinced, pending further UN inspections, that there is sufficient evidence of Michael Jackson's having had plastic surgery. Still awaiting the Blix report. Willing to send more nose inspectors.

Bernard Basset, SJ

Not fifty years ago, the highlight of our Godly week was Church on Sunday, an operation demanding our best clothes. In Church, our prayer was worded by priest and choir, our contribution as good Christian children was to behave ourselves as best we could. This weekly Mass was a peaceful, innocent expression of our submission, less to the Almighty than to our innumerable aunts.

In more recent years, the slant towards informality has been increasing and the oldtime disciplines have disappeared. I myself have heard morning and evening prayer discouraged as a middle-class form of hypocrisy. The case against them ran like this, that they pinned our religion down to certain moments when we should be living our faith every minute of the day. This current, happy-go-lucky approach is found on the parish level in the redoubling of efforts towards community, commitment, Christian charity. The fashion is for group discussion, community singing, offertory processions, kissing, organized liturgically. As to words in prayer, the goal is spontaneity. We are back to the gift of tongues and the tongue is much in favor at the moment, with a slight preference for bad grammar and the use of not too many verbs. Silence is out and private prayer if not actually discouraged has slipped into second place.

Bernard Basset, Let's Start Praying Again (Image, 1973), pp. 21-22.

Untitled, 1999

The chancellor of coffee-cups
Is stout and wears a mask of wrath.

He blusters through his coffee-shack
Sentencing phantom miscreants.

Here is a law; there, a fast lock
To keep the knaves in check, forsooth.

This chancellor dispenses rules
Which work like watches, bend like steel :

This is the way the sun must spin.
Without a chuckle, cleansed of quip.

It is obscene that planets dance!
We must be studious, must be plain.

The coffee-kaiser treads the tile
And shouts his edict, heaven take heed!

Rain on the driveway, black as ale :
Sparrows come not to bring good news.

Angels refrain from singing grace
Anywhere near the chancellor's face.

© 1999, 2003 by dylan_tm618

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

Prior to the Blizzard of 1978, most weather forecasters predicted 6 inches of snow for the Boston area. We got 27!

For yesterday's storm, we were hearing 1-3 inches, outside shot at 6. We got 12.

Anyway, here's Joe Fitzgerald lamenting New Englanders' lost hardiness when it comes to winter weather. With a fascinating side story about a photographer who didn't want to stay inside, for very good reasons.

BTW

If anyone knows the name of that plaintive song played at the beginning and end of last night's episode of Without a Trace, I'd really love to know its name and performer(s). Many thanks!

The Gen X Revert

gives us the Catholic version of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl."

Spotted the link at Eve Tushnet's.

Way cool. Way recommended!

Titles of poems that may soon appear here
with a brief description of each poem's approximate shape, mood & age

1. Mythology [2000. Obscure poem of dangerous emotion, sometimes flirting with pentameter]

2. Bad Weather [A turbo-dorky poem about heavy snow compared to homework. Written when its author was 16. Deliberately awkward enneasyllabic couplets]

3. Loitering with Intent [2001-ish. Exuberantly surreal prose-poem]

4. Kilmerish Rumination on the Infinite Creativity of the Good Lord God as Contrasted with the Somewhat Nifty but Noticeably Finite Creativity of Human-type Artist-Persons [Oh, I write one of these every day! A rhymed couplet of unimpeachable orthodoxy & metrical correctness]

5. Untitled Poem about the Chancellor of Coffee-Cups [1999. Unrhymed couplets of iambic tetrameter, trying to be Wallace Stevens]

Any preferences based on the titles? Any votes?

I could post the depressing one.

meaningless phatic utterance for its own sake
often polyglottal & polysyllabic

john ashbery
dharma & greg
any form of music video type channel
writing song parodies
the smiths

that's six guilty pleasures but well

Dubliner

Case you were curious. Don't want to affix the picture which won't show up.

An eagle-eyed correspondent

sends along this link from the Oxford Student of two Novembers ago. Chelsea blasts the Euroweenies!

"The idea that anyone believes America would enter into this conflict capriciously boggles my mind ... the notion that the United States is acting without regard to the Afghan people is offensive" she says.

I might have a bit more to stay about the current or imminent phase of the war, and my strongest qualm on the matter.

Also, might ruminate on why/how/when the Ecclesia, or many within it, developed an almost terminal dovishness. Perhaps with reference to the Spanish Civil War.

My opinion?

Instead of giving those interviews, he should have had some prolonged encounters with silence.

A celebrity theologian in a wintry season

How could Christians be led back to the sacrament of confession? Its practice appears now to be stuck in a serious crisis.

Certainly it is desirable that the sacrament of confession be more widely practiced again. The question is, of course, how. The simple exhortation to go to confession more frequently has to confront nowadays the argument (and the magisterium has to face up to this) that, according to the teaching of the Council of Trent, auricular confession is only necessary when a Christian has objectively and subjectively committed a really grave sin. And here the old practice of confession, which imposed on everyone the obligation to confess at least once a year, was based on a hasty and quite scandalous assumption that the ordinary Christian committed each year at least one mortal sin. Such an allegation is quite untenable.

From Faith in a Wintry Season : Conversations and Interviews with RENAL HARRK in the Last Years of His Life (Crossroad, 1990), pp. 187-8.

:: :: :: :: ::

And how would you define [yourself]?

I am a Catholic theologian who attempts in absolute loyalty to the magisterium of the Church to rethink Catholic teaching. This I can say in all modesty.

op. cit., p. 155

:: :: :: :: ::

If you could speak to President Ronald Reagan, what would you say to him?

I would say that I do not agree with the way he talks about atomic weapons. He speaks about them without shame and as if they were something natural and self-evident.

op. cit., p. 156

:: :: :: :: ::

How do you see the future of the Church in the year 2000?

The Church in the year 2000 cannot be a European Church exported to every imaginable country. It must be a Church in which Christianity has been inculturated according to the specific traits of each culture. So this Church must be decentralized to a much greater extent than the Roman officials now imagine. Speaking to Italians, I would say that that does not mean that the influence of the papacy in the world should disappear, only that the pope's important role (which can become even more important) cannot be developed according to the criteria of Roman centralism.

Canon Law too must be decentralized much more. Freedom must be given to the great churches of Latin America, Africa, and Asia to formulate their own canonical regulations in their own way. That requires much greater freedom than what is envisioned in the new Code of Canon Law. That code, despite some definitely praiseworthy modifications, has fundamentally only restored the old Canon Law.

The liturgy too must be much more decentralized. And finally, there are questions that are, strictly speaking, ethical ones for which answers must be formulated in a new way. To give an example: How in the context of Africa is marriage to be understood, if one is to remain faithful to the will of God and Christ? Such a question will certainly not be answered by those "poor Africans," if we try to impose upon them a pure and simple repetition of European moral teaching about marriage.

op. cit., p. 187

That's the ticket!
Court people's votes by callin' 'em dumb

From today's gossip column in the Herald :

Shades of Hillary Rodham Clinton - Teresa Heinz has become Teresa Heinz Kerry!

That's right. The first lady-wannabe, wife of presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry, has taken a cue from the former occupant of the office and stuck her hubby's surname on her pricey letterhead.

As of today, the ketchup heiress will begin using the Kerry handle.

``She's not going to change her name legally,'' said Heinz Kerry's spokesgal, Chris Black. ``But as the senator campaigns outside Massachusetts and introduces himself to the rest of the country, people found it confusing his wife had a different name. This just makes it clear she's married to him.''

Confusing? You mean, to those dumb reactionaries in the hinterland?

Well, not exactly, but perhaps just atypical of a possible first lady, and slightly off-putting in the echoes of Hillary. It shouldn't matter, but it does. Something akin to bachelorhood being an impediment, or looking as un-Pierce Brosnanish as Steve Forbes.

Remember the sun test of Chris Matthews (finished his book! maybe more to say), and the Wayne/Mellencamp test of d to tha illin'. This JFK doesn't have a ghost of a chance.

Big time personality vibe

from the RENAL HARRK book I took out of the library today, Faith in a Wintry Season, a collection of interviews with the sleb theologian whose name has appeared here too often of late.

The world according to RENAL. Roman centralization : Bad. President Reagan : Needed to be told that atomic weapons are bad. Mind-numbingly boring stuff, sicklied o'er with the pale cast of progressivism. The only attractions are those unintentionally comic moments where he says something absolutely ridiculous with a straight face. A man enamored of his celebrity, all too willing to hold forth to genuflecting reporters on the topic of what the Church should be.

At the beginning of the week, I had no quarrel with RENAL HARRK. Had heard some things, read some things. On balance, good; mistaken on Humanae Vitae. But no quarrel with the man himself. Rather, my primary quarrel was with the petulance of one of his idiotic partisans. HARRK had a more decorous defender, who did not convince me. Reason being, he quoted all these documents, had all the right terminology, but seemed to believe (as some conservatives and all progressives do) that the Church is all about legislation. (The cartographer decides that Vermont is west of New Hampshire.) It's what we say about God that matters, not what God says about us, or hopefully does within us.

Legislation. Why can't we just legislate certain things, and everything will improve, and there will be this bright new springtime after the bitter winter of Roman orthodoxy? See, there's just not enough play in the church, not enough happy mischief. So once we decentralize, whatever that entails, we will have heaven on earth.

This progressive parody of the Holy See as all-intrusive and omni-manipulative. Where does it come from? Does it come from anyone who has really looked at the Church in America in recent years? I can only go, as Meryl Streep said in the dingo movie, on the evidence of my own eyes. And we're not exactly suffering from a surfeit of heavy-handedness, nor from an absence of silliness, of mischief, of trendiness, of -- forgive this rather strong pejorative -- democracy.

After reading, oh, two or three of the interviews in this book, I've got the urge to exorcise my memory with a dose of Fr Straub. Whom I don't especially admire, but I do need a strong antidote.

But while we're on the subject of Roman centralization, why do we have so many problems when we've got a Pope, and Eastern Orthodoxy, without a pope, seems relatively free of the mischief and the dissent and the urge to "update" or to accommodate hoi polloi? Why, if there's this oppressive central government on the RC side, do we have the pastel palazzi and the ALL ARE WELCOME signs? Or is there an oppressive AmChurch government of woolly-headed progressivism where evangelization for the timeless truths is a hanging offense, and should be replaced with "doing community" and the like?

The thoughts of all are invited. The thoughts of many will be entertained.

Write a short poem

using the word "jussive."

Also maybe possibly probably

What the heck, I'll do it now. A few of my least favorite things about a few of my favorite things.

I liked the movie Arthur. And I liked A Fish Called Wanda. And I like Frasier.

But I suspect that Arthur was Hollywood's love-letter to a fellow who had run for president the year before, & was seeking reelection to his Senate seat the following year. Plus, it glamorizes addiction. But it's got Gielgud, and it's funny.

Wanda is objected to on political grounds -- all the pro-commie stuff; America as Otto as Rambo-without-a-jockstrap. A few tweakings of the catholica, as well.

Frasier has as a recurring character very effeminate fellow named Gil Chesterton. Why that name?

Oh, I'm just being hopelessly stuffy ... or not?

On the other hand, I love listening to the anchors of WCVB attempt to pronounce Jesuit. It's permissible, I think, not to zhuzhify the "s," but only if, in the British fashion, you make next phoneme is a "y" -- jez you wit. But of course, that sounds a little like iss yew for ishoo. So, here in the colonies, we say jeh zhoo wit. But jeh zoo it is, it seems to me, heterodox.

Recommended reading

A book by John Cardinal Wright (1909-79) called The Church : Hope of the World (Kenosha : Prow, 1972). Especially for an essay to be found therein, entitled "Faith and the Theologies" (pp. 42-49). Maybe some excerpts upcoming. Among other things, it explains why we don't have to read RENAL HARRK. We may, if we choose, but it's hardly a necessity.

Possibly probably

Am thinking of starting a new recurring feature called Fun with Theologians! or, Stop Playing with your Food for Thought ...

Am still pondering what to say in my post on formalism & personality. Which has been "imminent" since the fourth century. But am also thinking of a post on surrealism. (As you might have guessed, I'm sometimes pro-surrealist. But why? I'm not sure myself.)

Almost posted a disgusting & hilarious excerpt of Stephen Fry yesterday.

I don't like overpriced guppy food.

I do like exuberant Vikings in plaid.

I'm quite tired.

Vermont! Vermont! Vermont!

In the comment box of someone else's weblog (a great weblog, by the way), there's a fellow who says that the Church had better "liberalize" its moral theology, or people will stop coming to church. The Spongian "Christianity must change or die" bit. "Well, no one listens to the Church, everyone dissents from teaching A or B or C." That sort of thing. In an attempt to instruct the uninstructable, I posted the following comment as a reponse to his :

100.0% of Catholics are, in some way, sinners. The Church says : Your purpose in life is to be a saint. She even says : You have the right to be a saint! To be free of the slavery of sin. If the Church were ever to stop saying that, it would cease to magnetize, to energize, to inspire, to encourage. (The word-limit on the comment-box prevented me from saying further : In the last century alone, we saw thousands upon thousands of people giving their lives for this Church which some would have us believe is dying. Is this the sort of ardent faith and holy zeal we find in the progressive churches?)

Now, let's suppose that many Catholics are dissenters. So what? Belief in the existence of God would seem to presume that there's a difference between right and wrong, & that we don't decide that difference. Therefore, when the Church tells us that something is wrong, she's not doing so because some hierarchs decided that the thing was wrong. Any more than a cartographer decides, "Hey, why don't I put Vermont just west of New Hampshire!" Vermont is just west of New Hampshire, and certain things are wrong. The Church won't, & shouldn't change to suit demotic whimsies.

Psalm 6. Domine, ne in furore.

O LORD, rebuke me not in thine indignation, * neither chasten me in thy displeasure.

2 Have mercy upon me, O LORD, for I am weak; * O LORD, heal me, for my bones are vexed.

3 My soul also is sore troubled: * but, LORD, how long wilt thou punish me?

4 Turn thee, O LORD, and deliver my soul; * O save me, for thy mercy's sake.

5 For in death no man remembereth thee; * and who will give thee thanks in the pit?

6 I am weary of my groaning; * every night wash I my bed, and water my couch with my tears.

7 My beauty is gone for very trouble, * and worn away because of all mine enemies.

8 Away from me, all ye that work iniquity; * for the LORD hath heard the voice of my weeping.

9 The LORD hath heard my petition; * the LORD will receive my prayer.

10 All mine enemies shall be confounded, and sore vexed; * they shall be turned back, and put to shame suddenly.

Written in the dark

        Wanted : some
books
and a shot of
        sympathy

The House of Life,
        insinuate,
        incarnadine.

An avarice of sleep.
Of bright regard.

Had tender eyes,
        the demoiselle of dusk.

Rehearsing love, the beads of avenir.

We seek, forsooth.
Lost solace, stripped of crimp.

Tribute obsidian, mark you,
        this be wise.

        Supremacy,
        minuit, the single
        star:

        Mischief
        collective, wreck
of the soul-
less mob.

2000

To make matters worse

Eve hasn't blogged in six days !! (As of 7.36 am today.)

Where have you gone, signorina T? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you!

Update, 3.05 pm : The Lord hears the cry of the poor! Blessed be the Lord!

A greater sin than being heretical

is being boring.

And this is definitive, infallible teaching, to which all the faithful (readers of & visitors to this weblog) must assent -- because I, Pope Dylanissimus the First and Very Likely the Last, have proclaimed it!

And it is so.

eftsoones

    Eftsoones they heard a most melodious sound,
    Of all that mote delight a daintie eare,
    Such as attonce might not on living ground,
    Save in this Paradise, be heard elswhere :
    Right hard it was, for wight, which it did heare,
    To read, what manner musicke that mote bee:
    For all that pleasing is to living eare,
    Was there consorted in one harmonee,
Birdes, voyces, instruments, windes, waters, all agree.

    The joyous birdes shrouded in chearefull shade,
    Their notes unto the voyce attempred sweet;
    Th' Angelicall soft trembling voyces made
    To th' instruments divine respondence meet :
    The silver sounding instruments did meet
    With the base murmure of the waters fall :
    The waters fall with difference discreet,
    Now soft, now loud, unto the wind did call :
The gentle warbling wind low answered to all.

estlin : 7th of the 95

because you take life in your stride(instead
of scheming how to beat the noblest game
a man can proudly lose,or playing dead
and hoping death himself will do the same)

because you aren't afraid to kiss the dirt
(and consequently dare to find the sky)
because a mind no other mind should try
to fool has always failed to fool your heart

but most(without the smallest doubt)believe
no best is quite so good you don't conceive
a better;and because no evil is
so worse than worst you fall in hate with love

--human one mortally immortal i
can turn immense all time's because to why

Karl Rahner and Humanae Vitae

A review from The New York Review of Books, dated 21 years ago tomorrow, of the twentieth volume of Theological Investigations. The reviewer, Thomas Sheehan, finds Fr Rahner to be a very sympathetic figure, indeed -- a congenial antidote to "the fundamentalist vigilantes who each week fill the pages of the National Catholic Register with field reports on what they call the 'guerrilla warfare' that faithless liberal theologians are waging against the Pope."

In the third-to-last paragraph of the review, excluding notes, Mr Sheehan quotes Fr Rahner on "birth control and the ordination of women" and notes that the theologian "is quite emphatic" : "I do not see either in the arguments used or in the formal teaching authority of the Church...a convincing or conclusive reason for assenting to the controversial teaching in Paul VI's Humanae Vitae [encyclical against birth control] or to the Declaration of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith which seems to exclude the ordination of women in principle and for all time."

We proffer this review to suggest that those who have raised doubts about the orthodoxy of Fr Rahner are not to be regarded as hypervigilant.

Perhaps the discussion is hampered somewhat by my being underinformed. But there are those who have taken the trouble to inform themselves adequately, and who have come to the conclusion that -- on certain points -- Fr Rahner's position deviates from that of the Magisterium, and could be considered heterodox. To this untutored layman, the conclusion does not seem eccentric.

Further, we might contrast the ostensible scruple of loyalty which Rahner proferred to the See of Peter, as noted in the Shaughnessy article ("part of [the Jesuit] heritage to a special degree" followed by a qualifying "but") with the enthusiastic proclamation of the Church as a whole that the Roman pontiff is, in fact, the Vicar of Christ. The Pope has been lauded as the visible sign of the unity of all Christians by Billy Graham and Mikhail Gorbachev and just about everyone in between. Others have spoken of an ultimacy of moral authority in the Holy See. Fr Rahner was willing to concede merely that loyalty to the Pope was, to a degree, part of the Jesuit heritage. There is, shall we say, a salient difference.

We concede that the German theologian may have made (and if report be true, did make) many valuable contributions -- but we suggest that others have made contributions, as well. We suggest that it is not eccentric to have a preference for those theologians, apologists, and spiritual writers whose orthodoxy is not in doubt.

And it goes without saying that there are those whose "theological investigations" did scarce progress beyond the prayers learned in childhood -- who are among the saints in heaven.

Dave Barry

gives us his take on The Lord of the Rings II : a LOT More Stuff Happens. Why couldn't they just lose the ring down the sink?

Fred Reed's against the war

You know, the war we're rushing into. The war that hasn't happened yet. The war with Iraq, that's been "imminent" since last summer. The war that gives pastors in the People's Republic of Cambridge auditory hallucinations -- The drums !! The drums !!

Fred is a card, et demi. But in his most recent "diseased ranting; guaranteed reprehensible!" he makes the three mistakes of a good numbra people on his side of the issue :

1. Personal disdain for "George."

2. Oil! OIL! OOOIIIIILLLL !! (Scream the word "oil" loud enough, and it'll be apt compensation for not having a fraction of a point to make. But while we're on the subject, can we please start drilling Alaska?)

3. Confusing clever quips with a thorough knowledge of the issues.

Still, he's almost convincing me.

And more : it'd be entertaining as hell to have Fred in some precinct of the dreaded feddle gummint. Ambassador? Press secretary? State Department?

And, yes, why not go after Bobby Mugabe?

Owen Chadwick
in Michael Ramsey : A Life

[A passage treating of an issue which the Anglican primate Arthur Michael, Lord Ramsey (1904-88, Archbishop of Canterbury 1961-74) was compelled to confront during his primacy, that of women's ordination. Some in the Anglican Communion looked to Roman Catholicism to see if Catholic thinking on this issue was about to evolve.]

In the same year [1970] the Dutch Roman Catholic bishops accepted a resolution that their Church should consider whether women could become ordained. The resulting quarrel was discouraging. Yet three years later one of the two or three most respected theologians in all the Church, Karl Rahner, said that the practice of the Church in not ordaining women had no decisive theological reasons. He did not expect any quick change in the practice of the Church, but the practice was not a dogma and was based simply on a social structure which used to exist and was changing fast. If the next decades made Ramsey look naïve in expecting that the Pope would soon change, he then had reason for his expectation.

Chadwick, op. cit. (Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 283

And so to bed

... with a wee bit of pre-slumbrous reading, to be sure.

Possibly appearing tomorrow : Surreal, upbeat prose poem. Other good things. Eftsoons.

Flax seeds; or, a meditation on having really cool friends in far away places.

Maybe a snippet (oh, eighteen lines long) of the Sixteenth Century.

Maybe some Dylan Thomas. It's been a while.

Oh, yes, formalism & personality. Where did the idea arise that writing poems with a discernible meter is somehow stifling of a poet's individuality? Examples to be provided.

But this will be tomorrow, at the earliest. Good night, all.

Moon Landscape

A page at yad-vashem.org about Col. Ilan Ramon, the Israeli astronaut who died yesterday, and about Petr Ginz (1928-44), the young artist killed by the National Socialists at Auschwitz. Including a reproduction of the drawing "Moon Landscape," by Petr Ginz.

Many thanks to The Blog from the Core for directing our attention to this page.

An unfinished winter

Sad expanse of words, worlds this winter noon :
Technicians of surprise wither and fail.

Continual cloudscape, weak flurry, strong chill :
Dead weight of rime, frost on the bloom of youth.

Books do not solve the puzzle of Wherefore
Nor antiphons of Melleray assuage the endless ache.

Ceilings, blank of prospect, thwart caelestia.
Reveries scrabble, scamper, fidget and fret.

Inside looking out, from grey to grey,
Canonical prohibitions, dusty pages, phrases ...

Yesterday's will is the might-have-been of Now :
Tomorrow's pestilence remains unpurged.

The scrivener sits and pictures his late joy :
Princess of sable tresses, golden tread ...

a poem by estlin

crazy jay blue)
demon laughshriek
ing at me
your scorn of easily

hatred of timid
& loathing for(dull all
regular righteous
comfortable)unworlds

thief crook cynic
(swimfloatdrifting
fragment of heaven)
trickstervillain

raucous rogue &
vivid voltaire
you beautiful anarchist
(i salute thee

Las Vegas

There's a marathon road race in that fair city this day. I know someone who's running it. Here's hoping she completes the race safely, successfully, and happily.

Update : Mission accomplished! And within two minutes of her target time. Huzzah!

Non in commotione Deus

God does not dwell in turbulence. Found on p. 27 of Let's Start Praying Again by Bernard Basset, SJ (Image Books, 1973).

The W-haters

I'm really getting sick of them. Not many in St Blog's, but they turn up in other explorations. There are, of course, weblogs constructed by junior lieutenants in the pomo Poetburo whose main purpose, it seems, is to abrade.

In terms of the White House cancelling that poetry event when it became clear that it would merely be a forum for sexagenarian adolescents to engage in nose-thumbing, otherwise sharpish souls can't seem to see that Sam Hamill's or Adrienne Rich's opinions on geopolitics might be as, uhm, underinformed, as Donald Rumsfeld's or Colin Powell's opinions on matters prosodical.

Then there's the professor who speaks of "the illegitimate President." Let's suppose for a moment, for the sake of not wanting to wreck Virginia's belief in Santa Claus, that the Y2K election was fixed.

Good! Splendid! Three cheers for the Republican fixers!

We've gotten even for 1960!

Vaclav Havel

The blogger at Summa Minutiae posts an essay by the exiting president of the Czech Republic, and it is a marvel. In "Summer Meditations," Havel speaks of "politics subordinated to conscience" and offers his opinion -- few, if any, would be inclined to quarrel! -- that for any leader "good taste is more useful than a post-graduate degree in political science."

Biographies and photographs

of the seven astronauts. At the Boston Globe.

Linked to this column six days ago

and today's events cause us to turn to it again. The beginning of Jeff Jacoby's Jan. 22 piece mentions an Israeli pilot-turned-astronaut named Ilan Ramon, who did the civilized world a very great favor in 1981, and who was apparently lost along with 6 Americans in today's space shuttle explosion. May they rest in peace.

WFB

on Nelson Mandela's mischievous moral stupidity.

Southern conservatives are racist. Northern progressives are not.

Or so they say.

Via Rosa Mystica. A New Jersey school board published three versions of a "guide for parents" -- the English version, the Spanish version, and the African-American version. That last was basically the English version, shorn of polysyllables.

Schoolteachers must correct papers

with green ink, says an educator from across the pond. Red ink, you see, has negative connotations, and the sight of too much red ink could traumatize a child. Via The Rat.

Well, it's the same change that Far Left politicians have made in recent years. They're no longer Reds, they're Greens.

Are the Jesuits Catholic?
or are they ... AmChurch in excelsis?

Via Disordered Affections. From the Weekly Standard. A review of a book on the Society called "Passionate Uncertainty."

Boston's Jesuit Urban Center is mentioned in the course of the review, as having been cited in the local gay gazette as one of the best places to meet a mate. As one of my fellow Bay State bloggers said a while back : "Lavender without pretense."

Karl Rahner is mentioned, as someone who says that loyalty to the papacy is "part of our heritage," but who hints that the papacy might evolve into something, well, different -- as the reviewer, Paul Shaughnessy, asks, with more vexation, perhaps, than generosity : Into what? Pope Chelsea XII?

One Jesuit opines that the Church is being run by thugs; another, that His Holiness John Paul II is "the worst pope of all time. Don't misquote me."

Are the Jesuits Catholic? Are Democrats pro-life? The answer is the same. Some are, but I'm afraid, very few.

Joe Fitzgerald

on the retirement of a "miraculous" priest, forty-seven years in ordained ministry, who nearly died in 1971. The priest credits not only modern medicine, but also the prayers and solicitude of a legendary Boston Redemptorist, with having plucked him from the snare. The column -- an interview, really -- also contrasts the differences between 1956 and 2003, in terms of reaction to young men who sense a vocation to the priesthood.

Howard Dean is Big Brother

Found at chirp. Pro-abortion Vermont governor has "an initiative" (is it law?) that the family of every newborn in the state of Vermont will receive a visit from a state social worker within two weeks of the infant's birth. Presumably, if the dumb parents were not helped by such government tutelage, they'd be tempted to boil the child in oil.

Of course, if the mother wanted to stick a knife in the child's neck in the eighth or ninth month of gestation, the benevolent State wouldn't interfere.

This is why many people hate the Left. Viva hate!

Democratic toothbrushes!

I could explain that , but ... nah ...

Added yestreen to Places Oft Visited : Disordered Affections.

Allen Tate

Although there are some readers, of pains-takingly "correct" politics, who would accuse me of reactionary sentiment (oh, no!) and who would clamor for the suspension of my right to vote on the basis of what I'm about to say, I'll say it anyway.

Ode to the Confederate Dead is an awesome poem.

Read it (aloud, if possible) and see why.

The language of the beginning of the poem is more Latinate than Virgil, and yet it works. Paradoxical phrases like "casual sacrament" and "seasonal eternity" enhance this reader's pleasure considerably.

A sample of some lines toward the end :

What shall we who count our days and bow
Our heads with a commemorial woe
In the ribboned coats of grim felicity,
What shall we say of the bones, unclean,
Whose verdurous anonymity will grow?
The ragged arms, the ragged heads and eyes
Lost in these acres of the insane green?
The gray lean spiders come, they come and go;
In a tangle of willows without light
The singular screech-owl's tight
Invisible lyric seeds the mind
With the furious murmur of their chivalry.

Ashbery's promiscuous orchestrations

Am linking to a review of his newest book, Chinese Whispers. I used to read him quite a bit about a decade ago, but now find him to be a most unsalutary phenomenon & a dangerous influence.

Still, he's fun on some level. I still take his books out of the library, from time to time, for much the same reason that Alicia Keys watches the more annoying hip-hop videos : to know what civilization is up against; to lament the lunacies of the age; to deplore the resolute triviality of an indisputably clever man. To be entertained and vexed at the same time.

Possibly upcoming
not for sure ...

More poetry talk : Ashbery, Tate (Allen, not Nahum), and a brief informal meditation on formalism & personality.

Spiritual reading : from Eastern Orthodoxy, most likely.

Merton : his 88th birthday would have been today.

Just thought I'd check my blog

to see if I've posted anything since last night. Have I?

A small annoyance, true ...
but if people can go on about "nukular"

I love people who don't "embed" their links in comment boxes.

You know, someone who'll put a link that's longer than the Boston Marathon in a comment-box?

... impairing the readability of the other comments, by warping the size & shape of the window!

Here's a hint : "a href" those links !!!

The Administration vs the Poetburo

Not even close : I'm with the White House on this one. A planned poetry symposium to have taken place at the White House has been cancelled, because the poets were going to tell the President how much they don't like his policies.

Knuckle-crackle-kook-you-lar

This is, selon moi, a perfectly acceptable pronunciation of the word nuclear. Seven syllables, four beats.

But nuclear pronunciation is just one of the enticingly droll aspects of this litany of "impromptus" by one Jay Nordlinger, of National Review.

Other highlights : A convincingly unconventional choice for the most charming Democrat; and a new name for that holiday in December.

Celebrity gossip

[post deleted]

Let me clear my throat!
Kick it over here, baby! Pop?

Bishop of the month for January goes to Archbishop Myers of Newark, who recently made a decision regarding the discontinuance of allowing eulogies at funeral Masses in his diocese. Whether that was the right decision or the wrong decision, popular or unpopular, I applaud Archbishop Myers for making a decision and for acting, as he saw it, for the good of the Church, and for maintaining the solemnity of Catholic obsequies.

We have heard much praise of Bishop Weigand of Sacramento for his having rebuked the pro-abortion governor of his state, Joseph Graham Davis. Some of this praise is understandable. We don't often hear bishops being even rhetorically confrontational.

But will there be, we wonder, a disciplinary consequence of any kind for Gov. Davis? We are not optimistic.

And a question lurking in the background is : Why are bishops sometimes rambunctiously decisive about small matters, and flinch from making the tougher decisions on the more urgent matters? One would think that a professedly Catholic governor militating against Church teaching on the sanctity of innocent life constitutes a somewhat graver crisis than a eulogy that goes five minutes too long, or the decision to incorporate "Danny Boy" into the music of the funeral Mass.

I maintain that Bishop Weigand has done little more than loudly and impatiently clear his throat, in a futile effort to get the attention -- or to effectuate the repentance? -- of Governor Davis. We have seen and heard things like this, and things a bit stronger, before : the late Cardinal O'Connor on Geraldine Ferraro, and Archbishop Hannan on Mary Landrieu. The thing is, it has been but rhetoric. Good, necessary rhetoric. But when bishops have the power to issue a disciplinary decree (i.e., public excommunication), why are they afraid of this option?

I proffer this penultimate thought somewhat delicately. Hasn't the Church learned, in recent years, that it doesn't do much good in the long run to be overly hospitable to phenomena that militate against virtue, to misconstrue charity as a culpable tolerance of mischief?

On excommunication, some might say : The politicians have done it to themselves, so a declaration of excommunication would be superfluous. Uh-uh. The pols need to know that they've excommunicated themselves, and the country needs to know that about some things, the Catholic Church means business.

Also from the library

The Poet's Handbook, by Judson Jerome. A fairly ample volume on technique. The poet wishes urgently to impress upon the reader of his Handbook that, yes, despite what you may have heard, there is technique involved in writing poetry; that most poetry is metrical, and rehearsed. It is not, he says with some asperity, a matter of spontaneous effusion.

The late Mr Jerome seems to have been a man with a salutary skepticism about the fashionable, to the point of being sharp and even sarcastic. This is not a non-partisan Poet's Handbook! Jerome is a formalist, as is every poet when you come right down to it (a poet is someone who makes, who is concerned with form, who shapes the language; and the most resolute of anti-formalists has an obsession with form, is perhaps more vexed by the problem of form than your average metrician). Jerome is blunt in this book. He shows us an excerpt from the work of Paul Blackburn, and gives us his verdict that it is forgotten as soon as it is read. He asks whether a poem by Denise Levertov -- not one who fought shy of the unconventional line-break -- wouldn't have been better off as a single-paragraph prose-poem. He rearranges Amy Lowell, and concedes that his rearrangement can't really help matters.

I've only read a few pages, but this looks like a good one.

Oh, yes -- what, pray, do you imagine Judson Jerome's attitude toward E. E. Cummings was? He seems to have been quite "pro." Jerome insists, rightly, that in his most radical rearrangements of type, Cummings was not casual and not "spontaneous." He governed his language quite well ... and, Jerome reminds us, Cummings wrote many sonnets -- and verse as intricately metrical as anything by Sidney or Herrick.

The Poet's Handbook is no mere reactionary protest or polemic against the Beats (or against what Donald Hall has called the McPoem). It's a positive and salutary reminder that poetry is a craft, that it is conscious, that it is art and artifice. That although we are all poets in a certain sense (whether we make metaphor as adults or babble sounds for our own pleasure as children), there are certain things that can be learned, and are worth learning.

Patriot. Anti-elitist. Likable guy.

Took out of the library Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think by Chris Matthews (The Free Press, 2001).

He's especially good on the differences between the two candidates in the 2000 presidential contest. One quip about W vs. Gore : "The debate audience preferred the notion of having a guy in the White House who often spoke English as if it were his second language to one who spoke to us as if English were our second language."

And he has an interesting method of predicting future Presidential elections: "Look for the man with the sun in his face."

He cites the sunny optimism of FDR, and JFK -- the robust bumptiousness of Harry Truman -- the likable war hero Ike -- Jimmy Carter in '76, cultivating the persona of the folksy peanut farmer -- the deftly quipping, photogenically smiling (stern when he had to be) Ronald Reagan, chopping wood at his ranch into his 70s -- etc.

And then he says, Okay. Now think of Thomas Dewey, Adlai Stevenson, Jimmy Carter in '80, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore. They were born behind desks.

This theory (sunny, outdoors folksiness beats bureaucratic condescension) strikes me as pretty damn sound.

Look at the last contest again : It was something akin to a battle between two "fusion tickets" : Truman & Ike on one side, Stevenson & Dewey on the other.

Matthews' test (the man with the sun in his face) is remarkably similar to mine own. The 2-John test. Here it is :

In your mind's eye, picture John Wayne. Then picture John Mellencamp. Then combine the two, somehow.

Whichever candidate is closer to the Wayne/Mellencamp hybrid, that candidate will win.

But getting back to Matthews, for a man with impeccable Democratic credentials (his dad, though, a Republican), and for someone who remains pro-choice on abortion, it's amazing how often he makes sense. The personality -- and perhaps the thinking on some issues -- is much closer to the 43rd President than to the 42nd. Matthews is patriotic, unelitist, suspicious of a tutorial or overgoverning government. Deeply offended by the casual dishonesty that was the atmosphere at 1600 for most of the nineties. Very sharp on Clinton. And always, eminently quotable.

Matthews on the current President Bush : "Every time you lower the bar on this fellow, the easier it becomes for him to clear it."

Breakfast at Falco's

I need my coffee in the morning to get fully waked
Because at work I cannot take a flipping coffee-break
I need my donut, need my muffin, need my scrambled eggs
Or else I cannot move my arms and cannot move my legs

I need a cup o' joe, I need a slice of toast
I need some crullers, too, 'cause I like them the most
But then I hear the voice of something like a coffee-roll
That says "you know you want me; come on, eat me, I'm a Danish!"

I'm a Danish, I'm a Danish ...

The 1970s
and one from the early eighties

"Barney ... Barney ... Barney ... is your mother from Killarney?"
-- Det. Nick Yemana (Jack Soo) in Barney Miller

"Do you take cream and sugar in your eye?"
-- Archie Bunker (Carroll O'Connor) to Sammy Davis, Jr. in All in the Family

"Sit down, you criminal person."
-- Det. Philip Fish (Abe Vigoda) in Barney Miller

"Hey! Sharp as a tack!"
-- Det. Ron Harris (Ron Glass) in Barney Miller

"Certainly! You take the blonde, and I'll take the one in the turban."
-- Igor (Marty Feldman) in Young Frankenstein

"You have my permission to marry him."
-- Ralph Marolla (Barney Martin) in Arthur

Three women
New Revised Standard Version

Scratch Sandra Day O'Connor. Replace her with Serena Williams.

I like the idea of the three most powerful women in the country all being black. (And none of them named Maxine!)

Happy birthday, Oprah! (The crawl on CNN Headline News: Emmy-winner & icon Oprah Winfrey turns 49 today.)

Icon! ICON !!

Surreal headlines

Headlines of the four articles on the front page of The Back Bay Courant, a weekly gazette serving the aforementioned section of the Hub :

Eat Your Veggies

Local Hospital Wants Biowarfare Laboratory

Newbury St. May Get Public Toilet

THINK WARM

O - o - o - o - o - ohhhhhh - kay

Bit of trouble this a.m., getting to the 'edit your blog' page, & bit of trouble seeing all but the four or five most recent posts at the blogspot address. Have things been remedied?

But ...

(see post immediately below ...)

that's power as the world sees it ...

:: :: :: :: ::

I wonder if there isn't more power for the good in an anonymous eighty-plus-year-old nun in an inner-city convent, praying for the whole damn creation & brightening the day of whomever she glimpses!

I am slightly acquaint with just such a nun, who seems younger & is joyfuller than my tristful self.

I'm having a slight bout of optimism & good cheer; please forgive me. A ray of hope has pierced the darkness, & illuminated the soul with something approximating an insight.

It'll soon pass, & I'll resume being cantankerous.

But what matters more in the great scheme of things -- the prayers of Sister Mary Lucas (pseudonym) or the pronouncements of judges and media titans?

Well I wonder.

Sister ML told me once that she met the foundress of her order, now a canonized saint of the ecclesia.

So I've met someone who's met a saint! Small world, eh?

Three most powerful women in the country

Oprah. The opinion-shaping capacity, the book club, queen of all media, etc., etc.

Condoleezza Rice. Makes Margaret Thatcher seem comparatively like a museum curator in Vaduz.

For the third, I'm going to go with Sandra Day O'Connor, for the time being, because she has been so often "the swing vote" in Supreme Court decisions that affect the whole country.

(Hillary used to be on this list, and may join it again if my worst fears come true!)

Are you a liberal?

At dennisprager.com, a list of 22 positions or propositions against which to check your ideology.

The gist is : If you don't agree with most of the positions, and you're voting Democratic -- why, in heaven's name? Why?

Same thing, different names
via chirp

1. Kleenex or tissue?

Kleenex, methinks.

2. Soda or pop (or tonic or whatever)?

Brand name or type (coke, ginger ale). Never "pop"; sometimes (Bostonian, remember?) "tonic."

3. A sandwich on a long roll: sub or hero (or hoagie or grinder, etc)?

Sub.

4. Glasses or spectacles?

gwaffev

5. TV or television (or boob-tube, or telly, for our friends across the pond)?

TV, sometimes television, rarely the others.

6. Movie or film?

Movie mostly, film or flick sometimes. Cinematograph, anyone? Emphasis on the "mat."

7. Sofa or couch?

Couch.

8. Stove or range?

Stove.

9. Remote control or clicker?

Remote. Sans "control."

10. Supermarket or grocery store?

Name of supermarket (Star Market, Shaw's, etc.)

Three modern converts

An article by Tim Drake in the National Catholic Register. By way of the blogger at Disordered Affections.

I smiled upon learning that a young tree in bloom along the Charles River played a part, however small, in the conversion of Avery Dulles!

The New American Bible translators
have a whack at Clement Clarke Moore

(Complete "translation" to be released in December 2003 ...)

It was the vigil of December 25th :
      and audible within the abode,
No stirring creature, not a single one,
      tiny rodents being no exception.

Hosiery of red, carefully tacked into place,
      dangled from the mantel-edge
Happily expecting, eagerly awaiting
      Nicholas's canonized arrival.

Tucked securely under the sheets
      were the small fry,
Haunted by the cranial choreography
      of spectral fruit-snacks.

For a glacial forty winks
      our minds became mute,
My wife, who was wearing a bandanna,
      and in my night-cap, I.

A bit of Markham

The smack and tang of elemental things:
The rectitude and patience of the cliff;
The good-will of the rain that loves all leaves;
The friendly welcome of the wayside well;
The courage of the bird that dares the sea;
The gladness of the wind that shakes the corn;
The pity of the snow that hides all scars;
The secrecy of streams that make their way
Beneath the mountain to the rifted rock;
The tolerance and equity of light [...]

Glorious!

Did a woman write the Odyssey?

Samuel Butler says yes; The Rat says no.

Am linking to this post because I sense the obligation to link to any blogger who mentions the poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald, however en passant the mentioning of him might be. Fitzgerald (1910-85) translated both of Homer's epics and the Aeneid.

There's something uniquely satisfying about unshaky, well-wrought blank verse.

Stop me before I blog the entirety of Edwin Markham's Lincoln, the Man of the People!

:: :: :: :: ::

Also

On a much more serious note. See the same blogger on her recent reading of a book about North Korean gulags, The Aquariums of Pyongyang.

Highlight of my Sunday

Hearing Chad (Hill Harper) sing the sean nos song in the ultracharming 1998 film The Nephew ... have seen the film many times before; was glad to see this part of the film yet again ...

Questions

1. Who are the three most powerful women in the USA?

2. Who is the Bishop of the Month for January 2003?

Incidentally

I believe I am owed reparations for the ghastly treatment endured by the Poles at the hands of the National Socialists and Communists during the 20th century. I don't have a drop of Polish blood in me, but my ancestors did come from Europe, which is the continent where Poland can be found.

The mind is an enchanting thing

is an enchanted thing
      like the glaze on a
katydid-wing
            subdivided by sun
            till the nettings are legion.
Like Gieseking playing Scarlatti;

like the apteryx-awl
      as a beak, or the
kiwi's rain-shawl
            of haired feathers, the mind
            feeling its way as though blind,
walks with its eyes on the ground.

It has memory's ear
      that can hear without
having to hear.
            Like the gyroscope's fall,
            truly unequivocal
because trued by regnant certainty,

it is a power of
      strong enchantment. It
is like the dove-
            neck animated by
            sun; it is memory's eye;
it's conscientious inconsistency.

It tears off the veil; tears
      the temptation, the
mist the heart wears,
            from its eyes -- if the heart
            has a face; it takes apart
dejection. It's fire in the dove-neck's

iridescence; in the
      inconsistencies
of Scarlatti.
            Unconfusion submits
            its confusion to proof; it's
not a Herod's oath that cannot change.

-- Marianne Moore (1887-1972). See The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (Penguin, 1982), pp. 134-5.

The Blogg-watch Queene
elle se trouve ici

    The Signorina sings of watching blogs
    In cadences she borrows from the Smiths;
    Now Spenser's epic comes; the blogger clogs
    Her page with eighties tunes and lyric myths :
    There's not an excellence she's apt to miss;
    She'll guide you to a spate of lively prose
    With sharpish barbs, with mischievous verbal twists,
    With antic dithyrambs -- anything goes! --
With wit as pointed as the thorns upon the rose.

High Flight
by John Gillespie Magee, Jr. (1922-1941)

Oft have I slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds -- and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of -- wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue,
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace,
Where never lark, or even eagle flew;
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the Face of God.

:: :: :: :: ::

Lines from this poem were quoted by President Reagan in a memorial speech following the Challenger space-shuttle disaster, seventeen years ago today, January 28, 1986.

Rock me, Amadeus!
Mozart's birthday yesterday

Er war ein Punker und er lebte in der großen Stadt
Es war in Wien, war Vienna, wo er alles tat
Er hatte Schulden, denn er trank, doch ihn liebten alle Frauen
Und jede rief: come and rock me Amadeus

Er war ein Superstar, er war so populär
Er war so exaltiert, because er hatte Flair
Er war ein Virtuose, war ein Rockidol
Und alles rief: come and rock me Amadeus

Amadeus, Amadeus...

Es war um 1780 und es war in Wien
No plastic money anymore, die Banken gegen ihn
Woher die Schulden kamen, war wohl jedermann bekannt
Er war ein Mann der Frauen, Frauen liebten seinen Punk

Er war ein Superstar, er war so populär
Er war zu exaltiert, genau das war sein Flair
Er war ein Virtuose, war ein Rockidol
Und alles sucht noch heute: come on, rock me Amadeus

Amadeus, Amadeus...

I am not Saint Thérèse of Lisieux
but that's no excuse

In a prayer-booklet somewhere in this library of a room, there is a beautiful enthusiastic sincere personal deeply devoted Morning Offering composed by the French Carmelite. It is how she began her day, every day.

It is an instructive and rebuking contrast to how I begin my day. Usually with a groan, a deep sigh of ingratitude, and a three-word exclamation which I shall not reveal here. Suffice it to say, it's not Hosanna in excelsis or My Jesus, mercy or even Good morning, God!

The unprayerfulness is becoming somewhat pronounced.

But at 5.08 this morning, give or take a few microseconds, more than half-asleep but with some startling premonitory twinges in the chest, prayer was made. Briefly, instantly, fervently.

Got up. Walked around a bit. The pain went away.

I should note, too, that I've lately been in the habit of attending Sunday Mass about once every 600 centuries (please make allowances for hyperbole). My logic is, if I want to watch Barney, it's on PBS. And perhaps more seriously : A dominical celebration of the Eucharist shouldn't have to involve blocking out eighty percent of what's going on in the church. I don't really like my parish.

Still, even as I make excuses for the dominical truancy (grave matter, the Church tells us) I must acknowledge and confess : the prayer isn't there during the rest of the week. An occasional perusal of the Psalms, and petitionary prayer for those in St Blog's who have asked for it. Or a somnambulistic recitation of the Rosary, interrupted before the second decade by sleep.

I wonder if I believe in heaven.

I see the joy of other Christians, and marvel at it.

I see zeal and compassion, and nod approvingly ... but have not a whit of it myself.

There are things that rather need changing, course-directions that rather want reversal, addictions to various & sundry things (perhaps most toxically, the habit of complaint) that hinder one from seeing the Light in which one has publicly professed to believe.

There are those dreadful Saturdays.

There's the Francis Thompson line that comes to one, of all man's clotted clay the dingiest clot.

There's the Smiths lyric, To pretend to be happy could only be idiocy.

There is resentment. There are grudges.

Bill O'Reilly
at Jewish World Review

nails George Clooney to the wall.

If anyone bristles

at the Osbournes' language, you should hear me when the computer is functioning -- when the internet is moving -- at "Come on, Dover" pace.

This post

has been deleted.

Very. Wise. Answer. Indeed.

Gregg the Obscure in the comment-box below, answering the Eminem-vs-Bill Clinton question :

Clinton – while both have been responsible for the ruin of many lives, most of Clinton’s nefarious influence won’t be so lasting. Rappers eviscerate the consciences of untold millions, with little hope for future recovery.

A sentiment echoed by one of the brighter young talents in the recording industry :

Oh my God, the [hip-hop] videos! The imagery is so awful! I just can't get with it at all. The best thing I can say about it is that sometimes you have to see that kind of stuff so as to have a more balanced view about why it's so bad.

The newly 22-year-old (as of Saturday) Alicia Keys, offering her opinion on the use of women, sex, and sleaze in today's rap/hip-hop videos. (Via her bio page at the Internet Movie Database.)

Knew I liked her for a reason.

Who's cooler? (my answers)

1. Will Smith or Denzel Washington?

"In West Philadelphia, born and raised, on the playground was where I spent most of my days." One is mystified by the "at his name every knee shall bend" tone of voice wherewith the elder fellow is often praised. He is the National Homework, the State Religion. And charm & a sense-of-humor do tip the scales somewhat decisively in Mr Smith's favor. Plus, Will Smith is a miracle worker. He has taken rap, a genre that is on balance as benign as a swastika made of anthrax, and made it ... charming. Even though some would use the word "domesticated" or "harmless" as a pejorative. With DW, I've always gotten something of a personality vibe. I use the word "personality" Obliquely.

2. Alan Greenspan or Steve Forbes?

I can listen to Steve without falling asleep. Although AG is too sexy for his shirt, I choose Forbes.

3. Marcel Proust or Monty Python?

Haven't read Proust. But if I did, I'd wager he wouldn't be as enticing or entertaining as the Python sketch in which game-show contestants are asked to summarize A la recherche du temps perdu in 15 seconds or less. Besides which : My hovercraft is full of eels.

4. Kevin Spacey or Kevin Bacon?

Hamlet or Richie Cunningham? Wallace Stevens or Edna St Vincent Millay? Spacey, by furlongs if not leagues.

5. Tony the Tiger or Charlie the Tuna?

"I'd like to be under the sea in an octopus's garden, in the shade." He's big, he's blue, he's subaqueous.

6. Matt Damon or Ben Affleck?

The talented Mr Damon. Largely on the strength of Ripley.

7. Nomar Garciaparra or Derek Jeter?

On the basis of being Bostonian, in part, but really, whose name is more fun to say?

NO - MAR .... gar - CIIIII - aaaaa - PAAAAAAAARRRRRRRR - RAAAAAAAA !!!!!

8. Robert Herrick or George Herbert?

I'm more familiar with George Herbert. He seems to have a greater number of poems that immediately magnetize our mind and implicate our attention. But Mr Riddle's preference for Herrick is by no means to be discounted, and causes me to wonder if I've read Herrick with sufficient thoroughness.

9. Alfre Woodard or Halle Berry?

Halle Berry is an able actress, from whom one doesn't easily avert the eye. But there's a regal quality to Alfre Woodard that the glossy magazines miss. She is the queen of my heart and the empress of my soul. Plus, I was disaffected, a bit, by something Ms Berry said in an interview. (Ditto Alfre Woodard, but with Halle, the damage was more lasting. Odd, when you consider I remember Alfre's remarks, but don't remember Halle's.)

10. Luke Spencer or Sonny Corinthos?

Sonny's handsomer, you might even say sexier if you were inclined to think in those terms, but he reminds me against my will of The Fonz. I half expect him to snap his fingers, and have cheerleaders gravitate toward him like iron filings to a magnet. Lucas Lorenzo Spencer is much more multifaceted, and on occasion scarier than Sonny. On frequent occasion. Luke just might be the greatest character in soap opera history.

11. Eminem or Bill Clinton?

I can conceive of a politician worse than Bill Clinton. I can listen to Bill Clinton for longer than five seconds without feeling as if I am undergoing the tortures of the damned. He did excel at the ceremonial aspects of the presidency. I think of his reading of Psalm 1 at Oklahoma City, or of Sir Stephen Spender's "I think continually of those who were truly great" at the funeral for Congresswoman Barbara Jordan. I want Eminem to develop a lifelong career-ending case of laryngitis.

12. Jamie Buchman or Debra Barone?

No bloody contest. Jamie Buchman, especially from the earlier years of Mad About You. I dream of Debra Barone quite often. She's standing on the 15-yard-line of a football gridiron. Ray comes along & kicks her through the uprights, a field goal for which more than three points should be awarded!

13. Bob Dole or Pat Moynihan?

This one makes Jamie & Debra seem close. Bob Dole was the first man in American history to resign the Presidency without having been elected to it. He just can't win, and he doesn't win here. Imagine, if you will, a Clinton/Moynihan primary in 1996. Wouldn't that have been nothing short of great? And don't we owe Pat a debt of thanks for -- unwittingly? -- helping Rudy win the '93 NYC mayor's race? Moynihan's artice on "defining deviancy down" was, for all purposes & intents, Giuliani's campaign speech. And for many more reasons than the ones just cited, acknowledging that no one's perfect & that there are cases where Dole had the right view and Moynihan the wrong view.

14. Marianne Moore or Elizabeth Bishop?

Marianne, for the Complete Prose, most especially. My veneration for Miss Moore was one time as great as some other bloggers' veneration for Cardinal Newman. She has her disaffecting points. But I'd rather read a Marianne Moore review of a book by Elizabeth Bishop than read Elizabeth Bishop. I think, if I may venture to say so, that Elizabeth Bishop would agree with my preference for Miss Moore, whilst taking obvious issue with some of my reasonings.

Fred Reed's latest

A mite jaundiced, and perhaps more than a mite. When he writes "I do not oppose racial discrimination against blacks" (I read the sentence ten times before I was certain I was reading right), I can see why.

You see, he's fed up. He's fed up with aggressive racial chauvinism, and African-Americans today are (I'll phrase the matter primly, politely, temperately) not guiltless of this particular form of intransigent unbenevolence. He doesn't favor discrimination against blacks, but he can no longer bring himself to care whether a complaint about racism made by an individual African-American, or a group of blacks, is legitimate.

You become what you behold, one might say. If you see blacks fanatically attached with left-wing politics in a way that makes James Carville seem equivocal and unobnoxious, and if you see a racial self-interest that is hardly less culpable than that of Eugene "Bull" Connor, it does deplete the available supply of your tallerwince & thenthitivity.

When you see a commentator write that a pair of judges recently nominated by the President are "no friends of the community," simply because they are not slavishly obeisant to the divisive lunacies of the African-American left (Quotas in perpetuity! Reparations now!), a certain, uhm, disgruntlement can creep in to the tenor of your rhetoric.

While some of this latest Fred rant is a bit much, even for the paleolithically neanderthal likes of me, it is cheering to know that someone is talking about the things we shouldn't talk about. In a manner that is, as always, effervescent, provocative, and cheerfully pessimistic.