Waugh on Wodehouse

something to the effect that the Jeeves & Wooster novels "will release future generations from a captivity that may be more irksome than our own" ...

Hello all

Nothing much to report. It rains in Boston.

More later!

Heaven

The blue heaven, the wide heaven. The wild heaven, and the heaven of postcards. The rays of sun spilling forth from an evangelical heaven. Penelope's smile, Serena's slippers.

Heaven in the active valley, heaven on the passive mountaintops. Then there was Karen, and the girl that looked like Karen, her sister perhaps. Sixteen parcels of heaven. There was a robin who spoke to Robyn. A spacious heaven, a farmhouse heaven. And Cynthia's baseball cap. And energy, and winter, and purple petals, rose-petals, petals from the spotted lily. Heaven strewn like petals among the glossy magazines.

The frantic precision of commercial heaven. And the voice of beatitude, impinging upon our affairs, restoring prelapsarian purity. It is the first morning of the world, like a dazed flower breathing softly into the night.

Here we have heaven and an accidental psalm. Here we have heaven and October memories. The bumblebees, the lecture-hall, the celestial voice saying "Hey!" Behold, the abstract heaven of the fine arts gallery!

The heaven of laughter is a most acceptable heaven. The heaven of tears is a most acceptable heaven.

The heaven of poets with their particolored stanzas, their kinetic rhymes, their unassuming amphibrachs! And the heaven of painters, their symphonic colors composing a heaven, a polychromatic song, a hinting picture, an opus of heaven.

The heaven of silence and pine-trees. The heaven of starlight. The heaven of Kimberly, Tracy, Aisha, the heaven of peaceful names. The heaven of Kobayashi and his dewdrops, his autumn wind. The heaven of Forest Hills.  The heaven of Petrarch, of Laura, of the sonnets of centuries past.

Archbishop Sheen

God does not love us because we are valuable. We are valuable because God loves us.

[bibliographical information not at hand]

Memorandum

to a confrère

Accent grave on père.

Wooster

Bertram Wooster
via P. G. Wodehouse's Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves

Aberdeen terriers, possibly owing to their heavy eyebrows, always seem to look at you as if they were in the pulpit of the church of some particularly strict Scottish sect and you were a parishioner of dubious reputation sitting in the front row of the stalls.

Churchill

Winston Spencer Churchill
via Andrew Sullivan

I've taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.

Dante

Dante
Inferno, xxi, 139

ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta

News

Also from the Herald

Lutheran parish gathers and heals after poisonings and an apparent suicide.

Old Man

More on the Old Man

Campers heard a loud rumble. Story from the Boston Herald.

Psalm 70

Psalm 70. Deus, in adjutorium.

1928 BCP version :

HASTE thee, O God, to deliver me; * make haste to help me, O LORD.

2 Let them be ashamed and confounded that seek after my soul; * let them be turned backward and put to confusion that wish me evil.

3 Let them for their reward be soon brought to shame, * that cry over me, There! there!

4 But let all those that seek thee be joyful and glad in thee: * and let all such as delight in thy salvation say alway, The Lord be praised.

5 As for me, I am poor and in misery: * haste thee unto me, O God.

6 Thou art my helper, and my redeemer: * O LORD, make no long tarrying.

+ + + + + + +

King James Version :

1: Make haste, O God, to deliver me; make haste to help me, O LORD.

2: Let them be ashamed and confounded that seek after my soul: let them be turned backward, and put to confusion, that desire my hurt.

3: Let them be turned back for a reward of their shame that say, Aha, aha.

4: Let all those that seek thee rejoice and be glad in thee: and let such as love thy salvation say continually, Let God be magnified.

5: But I am poor and needy: make haste unto me, O God: thou art my help and my deliverer; O LORD, make no tarrying.

Inferno test

The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Fifth Level of Hell!

And that's just about all you need to know. After that quiz, I need a little heaven! See the George Herbert poem below.

George Herbert

Heaven
by George Herbert (1593-1633)

O Who will show me those delights on high?
      Echo.       I.
Thou Echo, thou art mortal, all men know.
      Echo.       No.
Wert thou not born among the trees and leaves?
      Echo.       Leaves.
And are there any leaves, that still abide?
      Echo.       Bide.
What leaves are they? impart the matter wholly.
      Echo.       Holy.
Are holy leaves the Echo then of blisse?
      Echo.       Yes.
Then tell me, what is that supreme delight?
      Echo.       Light.
Light to the minde: what shall the will enjoy?
      Echo.       Joy.
But are there cares and businesse with the pleasure?
      Echo.       Leisure.
Light, joy, and leisure; but shall they persever?
      Echo.       Ever.

As long as

As long as they don't replace him

with something called "The New Man of the Mountain."

Why is it

that we often hear people speak of a disconnect but we never hear them speak of a connect?

Old Man no more

Franconia, New Hampshire

The Old Man in the Mountain collapsed last night.

Story from the Union-Leader (LRR, just age and zip).

Vancouver

A few confessions ago, the confessor (an exuberant Italian septuagenarian, around whom it is impossible to be tristful) paraphrased to me the verse about Our Lord dying that we might have life & have it more abundantly, and about God wanting us to be happy, & caring for us, & wanting us never to lose the promise of joy in the midst of sorrows, etc. To myself, I said, "I'll take his word for it." He was obviously "telling the truth," because Fr V doesn't lie, but it was a truth that I've not really quite discovered yet. As if he were to tell me that summers are pleasantly cool in Vancouver, and rarely if ever sweltering. To continue with that : It's as if I've spent the last 11.5 years (back in the church) hearing about the weather in Vancouver, but never actually being IN Vancouver.

The Apostles' Creed

as given in the 1928 Book of Common Prayer
of the Episcopal Church

I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth:

And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord: Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, Born of the Virgin Mary: Suffered under Pontius Pilate, Was crucified, dead, and buried: He descended into hell; The third day he rose again from the dead: He ascended into heaven, And sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty: From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Ghost: The holy Catholic Church; The Communion of Saints: The Forgiveness of sins: The Resurrection of the body: And the Life everlasting. Amen.

A while ago

when the Curt Jester and his readers were taking a look at politically correct literary classics, did we overlook Charlotte Brontë's environmentalist classic Clean Eyre?

Splendor paternæ gloriæ

The hymn by St Ambrose. Am noting especially the lines :

Laeti bibamus sobriam
Ebrietatem Spiritus.

Haiku

Accounting for each
idle word ... the verse shocks us
into brief silence.

Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins

The May Magnificat at Bartleby.com

Bishop Sheen

Archbishop Fulton Sheen
from Treasure in Clay (Doubleday, 1980)

On a train trip from New York to Boston, I sat next to an Episcopalian clergyman. We began a friendly discussion on the validity of Anglican Orders. He contended he was a priest as much as I was, that he could offer the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and that he could forgive sins. He was well versed in history and in theology and our discussion proved to be so interesting that many passengers gathered around us to listen to the friendly debate. He got off the train at Providence. He advanced several steps, then turned around and, facing the audience which we both enjoyed, thought he would give me the last telling challenge by saying, "Remember, Bishop Sheen, I can do anything you can do." I just had time to answer : "No, you can't. I can kiss your wife, but you can't kiss mine."

op. cit., p. 300

Who's cooler?

Who's cooler?
Or are they equal? Or "haven't a clue ..."?

Pat Benatar or Debbie Harry?
Bruce Springsteen or John Mellencamp?
John Keats or Percy Bysshe Shelley?
Fr Benedict J. Groeschel or Fr Richard John Neuhaus?
Bishop Bruskewitz or Archbishop Chaput?
Condoleezza Rice or Colin Powell?
Marlon Brando or Jack Lemmon?
Calvin Coolidge or Gerald Ford?
John Major or Tony Blair?
Wittgenstein or Husserl?
Brandy or J. Lo?
The Breakfast Club or Ferris Bueller's Day Off?
Audrey Hepburn or Katharine Hepburn?

Two? Too, too ... two!

The 2,222nd comment at dylanblogs (error503 and this one combined) belongs to William Luse.

Archbishop Fulton Sheen
from his autobiography Treasure in Clay

In the early days when I was on national radio, a man came into St. Patrick's Cathedral one Monday morning and, not recognizing me, said : "Father, I want to go to Confession. I commute from Westchester every day. I had three friends with me -- all Protestants. I became very angry and spoke most disparagingly and bitterly of that young priest that is on radio, Dr. Fulton Sheen. I just cannot stand him. He drives me crazy. I am afraid that I probably scandalized those men by the way I talked about a priest. So, will you hear my confession? I said : "My good man, I don't think you committed a serious sin. There are moments in my life when I share exactly the same opinion about Dr. Sheen that you do. Go to communion and reserve your confession for another day." He left very happily, saying : "It certainly is wonderful to meet a nice priest like you."

op. cit. (Doubleday & Company, 1980), p. 298

It is possible

that things at more last than star may begin to move at a slower pace. Today seems to have been comparatively normal by the standards of the last half-year, but I begin to think that maybe one or two posts a day here might be more fitting, as it will enable more time for other pursuits (both the enticingly creative and the urgently necessary) and more time for the mind to sit in silence.

I don't like to skip days, have days of zero posting, but on a couple of days in the immediate past I came quite close to keeping silence. It's possible, too, that I'm too much of a blogaholic to stay away for too long -- and should that in itself be taken as an indication that I should stay away for a while?

I've done this before -- pledged to reduce the frequency of bloggings, even attempted to force myself out of it altogether -- but that really didn't work. So this isn't a resignation, or even a firm resolve to cut back. Just a recognition of the possibility that things may begin to move a little slower.

Poem Beginning with a Line by Wallace Stevens

It is the word pejorative that hurts

and the word sibling
that makes us lisp and wince
and the word raspberry that puzzles us
with its absence of rasp
and the word secular which
pertains to centuries
as fleet as milliseconds
in eternity's view --
the word subtle,
a rogue with a sly, furtive glare --
the word vehicular, one
of Deborah's favorites, and the word blithe
like an embarrassing lick on the end
of a leash. And vehement
is spearmint-flavored, unlike government,
and tongues wag like tails
of the unforeseen.

It is the word bowdlerize
that bamboozles, confuses, and throws
us for a loop. It is the word
boycott wearing a two-horned
helmet like a post-modern
Viking. It is the word memento
which news-anchors mispronounce,
and the word Kennebunkport
over which Mom always stumbles.

Oblivious gets our goat if it's seen
without of. It is averse from
that goes about town
impeccably tailored.
Vouchsafe and deign collide
like clanging thuribles. Hallowed asks for
and receives three syllables.
It is the word silent
that rhymes with
listen.

It is the word barbarian
that causes us to flinch.
It is the word avuncular
that coughs and smokes a pipe.
It is the word hirsute that plays a flute.

It is the word unkempt that sounds
so participial! It is the word
inchoate, cold as March,
that makes us search for April's
burgeonings.

2003-2011

Weather in April

One day above 70 is mildly enticing, especially when dry and with a cooling breeze. A stretch of two days above 70 is purgatory : the sun begins to give us its lobster effect. Three days above 70? Well, fortunately, tomorrow the temperature will drop a bit.

How do I get through the summers? We are in the (to my mind) unpleasant six months of the year now. On April 26th each year, the average daily high in Boston goes above 60. Which means that a sane, moderate, sunny 59 is "below normal" on April 26th ... until October 25th, when the average daily high dips back to 59 again.

Too few nights during summer in the city drop appreciably below 55. Too few mornings are cool. So, from now until -- oh, somewhere between Columbus Day and Halloween -- expect complaints about the weather to be nearly quotidian.

I should have been born in the Hebrides.

The quiet virtuosity, casual preter-perfection, & seemingly insouciant dexterity of Theodore Roethke
or, How did he do it?

How did he come up with these lines which, while never raising their voices, reverberate in the memory with greater potency than the stentors? All of the following lines are from one poem, "A Walk in Late Summer" (Coll Po, p. 143) :

Bring me the meek, for I would know their ways;
I am a connoisseur of midnight eyes.

*

God's in that stone, or I am not a man!

*

A late rose ravages the casual eye,
A blaze of being on a central stem.
It lies upon us to undo the lie
Of living merely in the realm of time.

:: :: :: :: ::

And he has lines in other poems even quieter, and even more memorable than these (which at second glance are not without their flair and flash!). From the famous villanelle, "The Waking" : God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there; from "I Knew a Woman ... " : She moved in circles, and those circles moved.

I value the poetry of Dylan Thomas, of Hart Crane, of Wallace Stevens, for their daring and (one might say, without derogation) their obvious renovations of the pentameter, their risking a radical estrangement from lucidity in the service of avoiding the trite, the hackneyed, the second-hand. But if we want a lower-key renovation, an uninsistent splendor, a quieter virtuosity, an almost accidental panache, we could do worse than turn to the poet who wrote --

She turns, as if to go,
Half-bird, half-animal.
The wind dies on the hill.
Love's all. Love's all I know.

["Memory," p. 136]

How can one resist

a teaser that promises "Murder ... Vandalism ... Ted Nugent"?? I may have to read Kathryn Lively's Saints Preserve Us.

Dylan Thomas
from Selected Poems 1934-1952

Hold hard, these ancient minutes in the cuckoo's month,
Under the lank, fourth folly on Glamorgan's hill,
As the green blooms ride upward, to the drive of time;
Time, in a folly's rider, like a county man
Over the vault of ridings with his hound at heel,
Drives forth my men, my children, from the hanging south.

Country, your sport is summer, and December's pools
By crane and water-tower by the seedy trees
Like this fifth month unskated, and the birds have flown;
Hold hard, my country children in the world of tales,
The greenwood dying as the deer fall in their tracks,
This first and steepled season, to the summer's game.

And now the horns of England, in the sound of shape,
Summon your snowy horsemen, and the four-stringed hill,
Over the sea-gut loudening, sets a rock alive;
Hurdles and guns and railings, as the boulders heave,
Crack like a spring in a vice, bone breaking April,
Spill the lank folly's hunter and the hard-held hope.

Down fall four padding weathers on the scarlet lands,
Stalking my children's faces with a tail of blood,
Time, in a rider rising, from the harnessed valley;
Hold hard, my country darlings, for a hawk descends,
Golden Glamorgan straightens, to the falling birds.
Your sport is summer as the spring runs angrily.

op. cit., p. 54 (New Directions, 2003)

Love changes everything

Reflection in the Saint Francis Chapel bulletin for 20th April (scroll down), by the chapel's director.

May is for Madeleine

My reading for the Marian month will be Madeleine L'Engle's Walking on Water : Reflections on Faith and Art, a borrowing from a kindlier than kindly soul!

Steven at Catholic Bookshelf

delivers an impassioned plea : We need Catholic writing. The latter of the April 27 posts.

Score

1.

These green dots raised like braille
Against the skin of sight
Are scores of newborn leaves
Delighting in the spring ...

2.

A score of green notes, glad and quick,
Sing from an April tree, "Awake!"

1996 by dylan

Dante
Paradiso, xxxi, 130-8
trans. dylan

And at that centre, with their wings outspread,
I saw thousands of celebrating angels
Each with his own degree of light and art.

Upon their merriment, at all their songs,
I saw loveliness smile, and there was joy
In the eyes and hearts of all the other saints.

Even if I had an aptitude of Speech
To match Imagination, I could hardly
Dare to begin to hint at such delight!

*

e a quel mezzo, con le penne sparte,
vid'io più di mille angeli festanti,
ciascun distinto di fulgore e d'arte.

Vidi a lor giochi quivi e a lor canti
ridere una bellezza, che letizia
era ne li occhi a tutti li altri santi;

e s'io avessi in dir tanta divizia
quanta ad imaginar, non ardirei
lo minimo tentar di sua delizia.

HBO decides

Oliver Stone's cinematic valentine to Fidel is ill-timed, what with a crackdown on Cuban dissidents. From this week's TV Guide.

Wallace Stevens

On her trip around the world, Nanzia Nunzio
Confronted Ozymandias. She went
Alone and like a vestal long-prepared.

I am the spouse. She took her necklace off
And laid it in the sand. As I am, I am
The spouse. She opened her stone-studded belt.

I am the spouse, divested of bright gold,
The spouse beyond emerald or amethyst,
Beyond the burning body that I bear.

I am the woman stripped more nakedly
Than nakedness, standing before an inflexible
Order, saying I am the contemplated spouse.

Speak to me that, which spoken, will array me
In its own only precious ornament.
Set on me the spirit's diamond coronal.

Clothe me entire in the final filament,
So that I tremble with such love so known
And myself am pious for your perfecting.

Then Ozymandias said the spouse, the bride
Is never naked. A fictive covering
Weaves always glistening from the heart and mind.

A blessed Pascha

to all Orthodox readers of this weblog.

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!