Well, breakfast at 10:02 am sounds good ...

... but I am usually up at seven.



Via Oblique House.

Addendum : I re-took the quiz, giving totally different (but equally feasible) answers to most of the questions, and still got 10:02 am. Odd.

Finally

Finally, there's something worth reading at the Poetry Foundation blog "harriet": A. E. Stallings on poetic diction, on poets who change diction within the same poem, etc. By way of illustration, Whitman's astronomer poem and a sonnet by Marilyn Nelson.

Ya no habrá sino todo el aire libre,
las manzanas llevadas por el viento,
el suculento libro en la enramada,

y allí donde respiran los claveles
fundaremos un traje que resista
la eternidad de un beso victorioso.

-- Neruda, the last six lines of sonnet 100

in Stephen Tapscott's "free" translation :

There won't be anything but all the fresh air,
apples carried on the wind,
the succulent book in the woods:

and there where the carnations breathe, we will begin
to make ourselves a clothing, something to last
through the eternity of a victorious kiss.

"Hope of the entire world"

I dunno. With supporters like these ...

"Anyone Else but You"

Speaking of songs from movies, it's a mystery to me why this quirky number wasn't nominated for something ... it's by the Moldy Peaches, from the film Juno :

"Falling Slowly"

By Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová. From the 2007 film Once. Winner of this year's Academy Award for Best Song :



A deserved win, imho.

More confessional advice

from Fr Powell at Domine, da mihi hanc aquam!

A very fascinating section on resisting temptation :

When you resist temptation on your own you are rejecting God’s grace and denying the victory of the Cross. There is no reason to resist temptation. You are perfectly free not to sin. Rather than steel yourself against temptation and fight like mad to resist the sin, turn and face the temptation square on. Name it. Hand it over to God. And move on. Resistance is actually the first step we take toward the sin. Be honest: how many times have you resisted a temptation only to submit to it eventually? What you are doing is habituating yourself to surrendering to sin. Break the cycle here by taking control of the temptation itself. Let’s say you are being tempted to lie to your professor about cheating on a paper. Say to God, “Lord, I am being tempted to lie to Dr. Jones about my paper. I give this temptation to you to deal with. I’m going to the library. Amen.” This is both an act of the intellect and an act of the will. Habituate yourself to using Christ’s victory over sin and stop resisting temptation!

(Link spotted at Mark Shea's blog.)

Disclaimer
I'm not turning (back) into a leftist

With my defense of Mrs Obama over the "really proud" comment, my putting up a YouTube clip of my senior senator belting out "Ay, Jalisco" (in which he garbles the lyrics) at an Obama rally, and my posting some beautiful lines of a Stalinist poet ... some readers might have cause to wonder.

With Neruda, it's the writing, not the politics, that magnetizes. And with Teddy K, well, that was just irresistibly bad.

tus ojos se cerraron como dos alas grises

-- Neruda, sonnet 81

your eyes closed like two gray wings

*

una copa en que cae la ceniza celeste,
una gota en el pulso de un lento y largo río

-- Neruda, sonnet 84

a chalice filling with celestial ashes,
a drop in the pulse of a long slow river

[trans. Stephen Tapscott]

Yo pagué la vileza con palomas.

-- Pablo Neruda, sonnet 78

I repaid vileness with doves.

Una canción

Auden's birthday!

To commemorate, some light verse by the master.

They're all OK

A helicopter with Sens. Biden, Hagel, and Kerry on board makes an emergency landing in Afghanistan.

Keats and Yeats are on your side ...

... a Smiths lyric for your Thursday.

Addendum : Here's a video that a couple of guys (not the Smiths) made for the song. Was going to post a clip of a live performance of the song, but it pains me to say that Morrissey is a horrid vocalist in live performances.

There's a moment in the video that strikes me as being, well, a little mean-spirited. And it seems they couldn't find a headstone with the date 1804 on it.

Mrs. Obama's minor gaffe
or, much ado about not much

“For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country,” she told a Milwaukee crowd today, “and not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change."

A minor gaffe, if a gaffe at all. Some have gone so far as to demand an apology, which is ridiculous. Call me unpatriotic, but I just don't see the big deal.

Get on Mr. and Mrs. Obama's case for their support of infanticide. That's an issue. If McCain tries to make too much hay out of this "really proud" comment, he'll seem like an aging jingoist throwing sand against the tsunami of youth and charisma.

Remember when Gov. Clinton in a 1992 debate referred to the sitting president as "Mr. Bush" (instead of "Mr. President") ... and four years later, with Clinton as president, Bob Dole was still harping on it? How effective was that?

Michelle Obama's gaffe, if a gaffe it can be called, is the approximate equivalent of Bill Clinton's "Mr. Bush" moment. Let it go.

"Dancers Exercising"

A poem by Amy Clampitt (1920-94).

I didn't realize you wrote such bloody awful poetry

I've stopped. Little or nothing except fragments for the last five years. Not even song parodies. Apart from the one about Benedict XVI to the tune of "Goldfinger," in which "papal throne" is forced to rhyme with "dissenters groan."

The last poem worth mentioning (?) was probably this prose poem from the spring of 2003.

I haven't stopped as a matter of a vow, or an active renunciation. The darned words just won't come. Writer's block, and how.

Tried a haiku today. Not for public consumption, 'tis so feeble of wit and conceit. Might send it to some kind reader, who'll doubtless chuckle at it, charitably.

Surrealism doesn't work for me anymore. I mean, I can read and enjoy some surrealist poetry, but I can't write it. And one would think that in this mode, almost anyone can produce something noteworthy ... or momentarily arresting.

I do notice things, rhythmically, from time to time; for instance, that the Edward Lear title "The Dong with the Luminous Nose" has the same meter as the Smiths title "The Boy with the Thorn in His Side": trochee, anapest, anapest. And of course, I can produce a pentameter at gunpoint or bayonet-point or Pilot-pen-point. But versification does not a poem make.

Oh, well. No need to agonize over it (but I do!). I can still enjoy poetry as a reader. And I think all nine muses are glad to be spared my effusions which were once so depressingly quotidian.

In addition to Zagajewski

I'm currently reading 100 Love Sonnets/Cien sonetos de amor by Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda, in a bilingual edition featuring the rather free translations of Stephen Tapscott.

Addendum : And here are links to several hundred poems by Neruda, including all the sonnets, in the original Spanish.

                                  if lances of trees
-- of poplar and ash -- still breathe aloud
like Indians, and if streams mumble
their dark Esperanto, and grass snakes like soft signs
in the Russian language disappear
into thickets

-- Zagajewski, from "To Go to Lvov," in Without End, p. 79

You'd think it would be easy, living.
All you need is a fistful of earth, a boat, a nest, a jail,
a little breath, some drops of blood, and longing.

-- Adam Zagajewski, from "You Are My Silent Brethren," in Without End, p. 236

Realized this morning

It is 2008. I started college in 1989.

There are students in college now who were born after, or around the same time, I began attending college.

I feel ... middle-aged.

An atheist epoch's Benedictines, missionaries of easy despair,
we might be a link in an evolution
whose sense and address no one betrays.
We're compensated in small, worthless gold coin,
and with the moment of bliss when metaphor's flame
welds two free-floating objects, when a hawk lands,
or a tax inspector makes the sign of the cross.

-- Adam Zagajewski, from "R. Says," in Without End: New and Selected Poems (NY: FSG, 2002), p. 152

Am pondering the wisdom ...

... of dropping the poetry links from my sidebar, esp. poetryfoundation.org -- there is a blog at that site, and its contributors are largely cacophonous communards of cultural catastrophe.

On the other hand, the site has a wonderful "poetry tool" -- a capacious archive of poems both traditional and modern.

Will keep it for now, I think. But it's becoming difficult to do so.

Books

R. R. Reno of the First Things blog writes about "golden" books.

This article claims ...

... that Barack Obama is a "natural" for the Catholic vote. It even has a wee bit of Latin in it (pares cum paribus facile congregantur), so I guess the author knows whereof he speaks.

"Catholics" do vote in strange ways. Old Born Alive Obama would, I think, carry a majority of self-described Catholics in a general election against McCain. But this is probably one element in an argument that the "Catholic" vote has nothing whatever to do with Catholicism.

What is salvation if there is no threat?

-- Adam Zagajewski, "Opus Posthumous"

Psalm 30. Exaltabo te, Domine.

1 I will magnify thee, O LORD; for thou hast set me up, * and not made my foes to triumph over me.

2 O LORD my God, I cried unto thee; * and thou hast healed me.

3 Thou, LORD, hast brought my soul out of hell: * thou hast kept my life, that I should not go down into the pit.

4 Sing praises unto the LORD, O ye saints of his; * and give thanks unto him, for a remembrance of his holiness.

5 For his wrath endureth but the twinkling of an eye, and in his pleasure is life; * heaviness may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.

6 And in my prosperity I said, I shall never be removed: * thou, LORD, of thy goodness, hast made my hill so strong.

7 Thou didst turn thy face from me, * and I was troubled.

8 Then cried I unto thee, O LORD; * and gat me to my LORD right humbly.

9 What profit is there in my blood, * when I go down into the pit?

10 Shall the dust give thanks unto thee? * or shall it declare thy truth?

11 Hear, O LORD, and have mercy upon me; * LORD, be thou my helper.

12 Thou hast turned my heaviness into joy; * thou hast put off my sackcloth, and girded me with gladness:

13 Therefore shall every good man sing of thy praise without ceasing. * O my God, I will give thanks unto thee for ever.

Fr Philip's Ten Commandments for a Good Lenten Confession

Here.

Most readers of this blog are in no danger of violating number 10. But the others might be worth our (my) attention.

Hat tip: The Curt Jester.

The innocent little lambkins

Why don't we just skip all the folderol and have Pope Benedict canonize them now?

Hasten ye all

to read Eve's piece on "repetitive" prayer at Godspy. An excellence.

Romney out

The Herald on Mitt's exit.

Is it Catholic or is it Memorex?

Or something worse than Memorex?

The blogger at Dyspeptic Mutterings suggests how we might test the authentic catholicity of a given statement.

At nearly nineteen stone

I might be prevented from dining at restaurants in Mississippi.

And to think the bill was written by a Republican! Yikes!

Via Vox Nova.

.947

Oh well. There's still the Celtics.

Congratulations, New York!

This is Stalinist

Gov. Spitzer of New York would force Catholic hospitals to perform acts of prenatal infanticide.

And something tells me he's not alone among Democratic governors, or candidates for president.

Via the Curt Jester.

Hubert van Zeller, OSB (1904-84)
Letters to a Soul (Templegate, 1976, 122 pp.)

From Letter 24:

A family is starving in the desert and the mother dies. The baby is crying out for its mother's milk. The father can explain that there is no milk to be had but the baby goes on crying for milk. The father may give the baby a tin of petrol to drink or a flask of brandy, but this won't help because if there is no milk the baby will die. All of us are thirsty for love. We are not going to be saved by petrol or brandy because what we need is milk. People can tell us until they are black in the face that all we want is liquid of some sort, liquid of any sort, and we won't be thirsty any more. Up to a point they are right: momentarily the thirst is met. But unless the thirst is met with the liquid which it is meant to have it will be worse off than it was before, worse off than if there were nothing at all. To make the story even more depressing I might add that for the father to tell the baby that its thirst was purely imaginary, that it mustn't make such a fuss, that what it really needed was a good sleep would only complicate the matter. The baby, quite rightly, would go on crying. Now sit down for five minutes and think of what the world does to meet the need for love. No wonder we all cry too much.

And from Letter 34:

[ ... ] you ask about Lent. Today being Ash Wednesday, and the mails being what they are, you will not get what follows until halfway through the penitential season. Lent has been so played down by the church -- unfortunately as I think -- that one has to invent all sorts of substituting horrors of one's own. The mistake is to think that the list of things 'given up for Lent' is the important part. Any fool can be hungry. And there are other good reasons apart from Lent to give up smoking and drinking. My advice would be to look to the positive rather than to the negative aspect of Lent: more prayer, more reading, the stations of the cross, the rosary said slowly ... rather than putting a ban on television or newspapers. This may strike you as very old-fashioned but this year I am taking the 'seven words from the cross' and seeing how they can be worked into both my own life and the contemporary scene. Look them up: three of our Lord's last recorded sayings are about others and four are about himself. [ ... ]

Personally I always find it easier to make suggestions about prayer than about penance. Penance can be taken up in a spirit which has little or nothing to do with love, and unless penance is prayerful as well as penitential -- that is to say orientated towards Christ's passion and not merely punitive -- I doubt if our Lent can mean much. That's why I recommend the consideration of our Lord's words from the cross. All seven of them are about love.

Additional selections from the writings of Fr van Zeller.

Fled is the blasted verdure of the fields;
And, shrunk into their beds, the flowery race
Their sunny robes resign. E'en what remained
Of stronger fruits falls from the naked tree;
And woods, fields, gardens, orchards all around,
The desolated prospect thrills the soul.

-- James Thomson (1700-48)

Paul Evdokimov
From his book Woman and the Salvation of the World (St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1994), pp. 223-5, passim


To woman belongs the task of correcting the masculine zeal that blunders so frequently, deeper and deeper, into a profanation of the mysteries, to the detriment of the spiritual values.

:: :: ::

In the Kontakion of the Annunciation, the Virgin is called the "victorious leader of triumphant hosts" -- not as a woman warrior but as one who is, by nature, deadly to demons and invincible by her triumphant purity. She has the power to bruise the head of the serpent, but not by her deeds (the domain of the masculine). It is through her very being that "in her invincible power, she keeps us free from every peril."

:: :: ::

The fact that a woman gave birth to God shows the power of every woman, when she is indeed a "new creation," to bring forth God in devastated souls.

:: :: ::

Salvation will come only from holiness; but in the conditions of actual life, sanctity is more at home to woman. The Virgin "treasured up all these things in her heart" (Lk 2:51); every woman holds an innate intimacy, almost a complicity, with the tradition, with the continuity of life. In God, existence coincides with essence. In holiness, a woman is more apt to come close to this relationship of essence and existence through the power of humility, since "humility is the art of finding oneself exactly at one's place." In contrast to all egalitarianism and all demands, this is the most natural resplendence of her charismatic state. This is the ministry of the Paraclete, the grace of consolation and of joy, which presupposes a feminine being as a mother for whom each being is a child. The world will be saved by Beauty -- not just any beauty, but that of the Holy Spirit, that of the woman "robed with the sun."

Super Bowl questions

Why does "Plaxico" rhyme with "Mexico"?

And why does "Adalius" have only three syllables?

She is an angel. She is a goddess. And she's waiting for you in the bathroom.

-- Dr. Niles Crane on an episode of Frasier

Sister Wendy on Prayer
page 116

I have heard people praising "simple faith." What they are referring to is an almost rote reception of mass and the sacraments based on pitifully slight knowledge of the teaching of our Blessed Lord. What they are really describing is ignorant faith, lazy faith [...]

Etcetera.

I find this passage extremely disagreeable. And given Sister Wendy's erroneous description of transubstantiation, it is she who might be credibly accused of a "pitifully slight knowledge of the teaching of our Blessed Lord."

Sister Wendy on Prayer
page 50

Rote prayer is not prayer at all.

Your comments are invited.

Sister Wendy on Prayer
page 71

Even for Catholics, the Eucharist is something mysterious. It is both sacrifice and celebration, a spiritual reenactment of the Last Supper. Medieval theologians made up a word for what happens and called it "transubstantiation." This means that materially, physically, the bread and wine are still there, but in actuality the essence of them has been changed into the true living body of Christ.

Wrong.

Materially, physically, substantially, the bread and wine are no longer there. The substance changes. The accidents (appearances) remain the same.

And "spiritual reenactment" is, I think, not the proper term.

There are other objections to Sister Wendy's book: her views on original sin (p. 101), on homosexuality (p. 117), on the gender of the pronouns we use for God in Christian revelation (p. 77), are at sometimes subtle, sometimes glaring variance with the magisterium of the Church.

Will probably post one more excerpt (p. 116), in which she derides "simple faith," the faith that thinks with the Church.

Sister Wendy on Prayer

Charming. Pleasant. Heretical.

More, perhaps, later.