Muscular boy?

She's a muscular boy must to avoid ...

Cummings

Cummings
the 60th of his 95 poems

dive for dreams
or a slogan may topple you
(trees are their roots
and wind is wind)

trust your heart
if the seas catch fire
(and live by love
though the stars walk backward)

honour the past
and welcome the future
(and dance your death
away at this wedding)

never mind a world
with its villains or heroes
(for god likes girls
and tomorrow and the earth)

Misheard

Misheard '60s song-lyric
from Herman's Hermits

Original: She's a must-to-avoid ...

What I heard: She's a muscular boy ...

Pentecost

Pentecost

Veni, Sancte Spiritus,
et emitte caelitus
lucis tuae radium.

Veni, pater pauperum,
veni, dator munerum
veni, lumen cordium.

Consolator optime,
dulcis hospes animae,
dulce refrigerium.

In labore requies,
in aestu temperies
in fletu solatium.

O lux beatissima,
reple cordis intima
tuorum fidelium.

Sine tuo numine,
nihil est in homine,
nihil est innoxium.

Lava quod est sordidum,
riga quod est aridum,
sana quod est saucium.

Flecte quod est rigidum,
fove quod est frigidum,
rege quod est devium.

Da tuis fidelibus,
in te confidentibus,
sacrum septenarium.

Da virtutis meritum,
da salutis exitum,
da perenne gaudium.

(Translation here.)

Fr Groeschel

On one occasion, an abortion clinic voluntarily closed because of the huge number of pro-life demonstrators. When our brothers in their gray habits turned away and proceeded home on the subway, they were followed by a number of pro-abortion demonstrators who thought they were moving on to another clinic. Suddenly these women were terrified to find themselves in the middle of the subway station in a run-down section called Fort Apache. This gave our brothers the first opportunity they had ever had to speak to them. In fact, the brothers remained with the women to see that they got safely back on the subway. Some of the protestors admitted that they had listened to the other side for the first time.

Benedict J. Groeschel, CFR, Healing the Original Wound, p. 132

Viva hate

"Hate Poem"
by Julie Sheehan

I don't hate this poem. Never heard of the author, but it made me smile.

Quiz

Poetry quiz!

I am heroic couplets; most precise And fond of order. Planned and structured. Nice. I know, of course, just what I want; I know, As well, what I will do to make it so. This doesn't mean that I attempt to shun Excitement, entertainment, pleasure, fun; But they must keep their place, like all the rest; They might be good, but ordered life is best. What Poetry Form Are You?

The last time I took this quiz I was a rubai.

Via For Keats' Sake!

Hillary

George Will's latest

Yankee Fan Go Home. About -- who else? -- the Hillcat, as TSO calls her.

Andrew Sullivan linked to this article, but didn't quote the best parts, of which there are many; e.g.:

[Sen. Clinton] may think, or at least would argue, that when she was 12 her Yankees really won the 1960 World Series, by standards of "fairness," because they trounced the Pirates in runs scored, 55-27, over seven games, so there.

Unfortunately, baseball's rules -- pesky nuisances, rules -- say it matters how runs are distributed during a World Series. The Pirates won four games, which is the point of the exercise, by a total margin of seven runs, while the Yankees were winning three by a total of 35 runs. You can look it up.

Read Will's evisceration of the "lifelong" pinstripes-booster and her elaborate math.

Fr Groeschel

I used to kid myself that I didn't have the same prejudices as many others. [...] However, the very real prejudices I do harbor are much more deep-seated, and thus much more pagan. Do you know whom I have a burning prejudice against? People who don't like me, or ignore me, or think that what I have to say is not worthwhile. I'm not particular. If you like me, it doesn't matter to me who or what you are. But if you don't appreciate me or what I have to say, a little pagan quickly rears his ugly head, full of prejudices and hurt feelings.

Perhaps you thought priests were holier than that. Don't I wish!

Benedict J. Groeschel, CFR, Healing the Original Wound, pp. 106-7

Sacred Scripture

Can a man take fire in his bosom, and his clothes not be burned?

Proverbs 6:27

Fr Groeschel

The Christian is called not only to appreciate Christ but to follow Christ.

Benedict J. Groeschel, CFR, Healing the Original Wound, p. 95

Observation

Amaryllis is made of vers libre.

Cummings

Cummings

if seventy were young

Hiatus

Another blogging hiatus upcoming

This time, from tomorrow morning until Wednesday, possibly Thursday.

Fr Groeschel

A sister who was the head of the Holy Ghost Hospital in Rome introduced herself to Pope John XXIII by saying, "I'm the superior of the Santo Spiritu." The pope shot back, "The superior of the Holy Ghost! I'm only the Vicar of Christ."

Benedict J. Groeschel, CFR, Healing the Original Wound, p. 85

Roethke

In this, the diocese of mice,
Who's bishop of breathing?

Theodore Roethke, from "O, Lull Me, Lull Me"

Hopkins

The May Magnificat
by Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ (1844-89)

May is Mary's month, and I
Muse at that and wonder why:
      Her feasts follow reason,
      Dated due to season—

Candlemas, Lady Day;
But the Lady Month, May,
      Why fasten that upon her,
      With a feasting in her honour?

Is it only its being brighter
Than the most are must delight her?
      Is it opportunest
      And flowers finds soonest?

Ask of her, the mighty mother:
Her reply puts this other
      Question: What is Spring?—
      Growth in every thing—

Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
Grass and greenworld all together;
      Star-eyed strawberry-breasted
      Throstle above her nested

Cluster of bugle blue eggs thin
Forms and warms the life within;
      And bird and blossom swell
      In sod or sheath or shell.

All things rising, all things sizing
Mary sees, sympathising
      With that world of good,
      Nature's motherhood.

Their magnifying of each its kind
With delight calls to mind
      How she did in her stored
      Magnify the Lord.

Well but there was more than this:
Spring's universal bliss
      Much, had much to say
      To offering Mary May.

When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple
Bloom lights the orchard-apple
      And thicket and thorp are merry
      With silver-surfèd cherry

And azuring-over greybell makes
Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes
      And magic cuckoocall
      Caps, clears, and clinches all—

This ecstasy all through mothering earth
Tells Mary her mirth till Christ's birth
      To remember and exultation
      In God who was her salvation.

Hiatus

Blogging hiatus upcoming

from this evening until late Thursday.

Sestina at 20

Make ready for the coming of the spring!
Away with all those memories of pain!
A world begins where few thoughts are final.
Through rayed blue skies the shining seagulls plunge
Suddenly, as if to halt a crisis
Wherein the land thickens with strange green growth.

Patches of earth, so long unused to growth,
Are now faced with the happy threat of spring:
A sweet disturbance and a welcome crisis,
A dangerous thrill, a pleasurable pain.
Green stems soar into light; careful roots plunge
Fingers into darkness whose face is final.

Winter had a way of seeming final,
Excluding possibilities of growth.
Snowflakes fell; the mercury took its plunge.
We waited for the necessary spring
To melt the brace of icy pain
Which placed our hearts in subzero crisis.

In each new weather, twittering in crisis,
Brisk sparrows gather in trees that are final
On branches that tremble in frequent pain.
We hear crisp notes, exclamations of growth --
How do we take the temperature of spring?
How deeply into subsoil must we plunge?

Answer: We deal in surfaces, no plunge
Involved in calculating our crisis.
It is spring when the wind says it is spring;
The sentence of our skin and pulse is final.
We know we have achieved our sought-for growth
In the smooth scour of sunlight when our pain

Of winter changes into sweeter pain.
Love menaces us and we take the plunge;
We gamble on joy's exponential growth,
Oblivious of a round-the-corner crisis.
"But hope is endless, fear is never final,"
Hints the blunt dusk. We feel the sting of spring

And thus does spring remind us of our pain.
Summer makes it final. The brief nights plunge
Our blood into a crisis we call growth.

Quotation

Even in the darkness of mortal sin, faith is constantly preaching.

Fr Frederick Faber, via Groeschel, Healing the Original Wound, p. 57

Night

Small hush.
World grows dark,
dusk deep.

Trees stand
stark, tall. Hills
crave sleep.

Keep still.
Make life a
curled stone.

Peace comes plain to
the loved soul's home.

Need for words,
for cares of
the quick, there
is no more.

1991

Syesha

To change gears somewhat

Why is she always in the bottom three?

Fr Groeschel

God is full of compassion, always looking for some way to reach the lost and forsaken. Don't try to understand how God will save somebody else. Cardinal John Henry Newman pointed out that the grace that suits one person is not the grace that suits another. We have no right to say how and when and where God will lead another person to salvation. The ways by which perfection is reached reflect infinite variety. Our wounded souls require very different medicines. God can even lead a person by means of his or her weakness and sin.

Benedict J. Groeschel, CFR, Healing the Original Wound (Ann Arbor: Servant Publications, 1993), p. 35

Quotation

In the presto of the morning, Crispin trod

Wallace Stevens, from "The Comedian as the Letter C"

Roethke

A Rouse for Stevens
by Theodore Roethke (1908-63)

(To Be Sung in a Young Poets' Saloon)

Wallace Stevens, what's he done?
He can play the flitter-flad;
He can see the second sun
Spinning through the lordly cloud.

He's imagination's prince:
He can plink the skitter-bum;
How he rolls the vocables,
Brings the secret -- right in Here!

Wallace, Wallace, wo ist er?
Never met him, Dutchman dear;
If I ate and drank like him,
I would be a chanticleer.

Speak it from the face out clearly:
Here's a mensch but can sing dandy.
Er ist niemals ausgepoopen,
Altes Wunderkind.

Roar 'em, whore 'em, cockalorum,
The Muses, they must all adore him,
Wallace Stevens -- are we for him?
Brother, he's our father!

Swearing

I'm too nice

Via Dyspeptic Mutterings:

Schoolhouse Rock

The preamble

Yes, from Schoolhouse Rock, the '70s educational series of cartoons. This being Patriots' Day Week (forgive the awkward phrasing) in Massachusetts, I suppose I should post "The Shot Heard 'Round the World," but this tune is catchier. Three minutes:

Verlaine

Mandoline
by Paul Verlaine (1844-96)

Les donneurs de sérénades
Et les belles écouteuses
Echangent des propos fades
Sous les ramures chanteuses.

C'est Tircis et c'est Aminte,
Et c'est l'éternel Clitandre,
Et c'est Damis qui pour mainte
Cruelle fait maint vers tendre.

Leurs courtes vestes de soie,
Leurs longues robes à queues,
Leur élégance, leur joie
Et leurs molles ombres bleues

Tourbillonnent dans l'extase
D'une lune rose et grise,
Et la mandoline jase
Parmi les frissons de brise.

_______________


(The givers of serenades and the lovely women who listen exchange insipid words under the singing branches.

There is Thyrsis and Amyntas and there's the eternal Clytander, and there's Damis who, for many a cruel woman, wrote many a tender verse.

Their short silk coats, their long dresses with trains, their elegance, their joy and their soft blue shadows,

whirl around in the ecstasy of a pink and grey moon, and the mandolin prattles among the shivers from the breeze.)

Hot

Close to eighty (27° C.) tomorrow

Let there be sung Non nobis and Te Deum.

By somebody else, not me.

Meme

Touched by an angel?
Almost! Tagged with a meme!

(tagged by alias clio)

What I was doing ten years ago: Answering phones, and updating baptismal records, and straightening out files in an inner-city rectory.

Three things on my To-Do list today: Dinner; go to Chelsea; listen to my favorite nighttime talk show on the radio.

Things I would do if I were a billionaire: Give a fraction to charity, take care of relatives, and probably become dissolute.

Three of my bad habits: Verbosity, laziness, junk food.

Five places I've lived: Somerville, East Boston, Amherst, Chelsea and here. All in Massachusetts, New England, USA.

Six jobs I've had: Clerical temp work; a few days at a CVS; a few days at an Au Bon Pain; ice-cream scooper (three months); security guard (close to two years); the rectory thing (a couple of years).

Five books I've recently read:
1. Dakota by Kathleen Norris
2. Reflections on the Psalms by C S Lewis
3. Women and the Priesthood, ed. Thomas Hopko (1983 edition)
4. Thomas Merton: Master of Attention by Robert Waldron
5. 100 Love Sonnets by Pablo Neruda

Coffee

need coffee

Dakota: A Spiritual Geography by Kathleen Norris
a few disorganized comments

Something of a mixed bag, more good than bad. The book likens the experience of living in the western Dakotas to that of monasticism. Some poetry in prose as she enthuses over the landscape, and her occasional visits to a nearby Benedictine monastery. (Norris is a Presbyterian.) The book is marred by some digressions on economics that may have seemed necessary to the author, but which did not magnetize this reader; also, there are some remarks about her fellow townspeople (their provincialism, their being "set in their ways") that seem to flirt with "Snobama"-type elitism. There is the incredible claim on p. 210 that the Benedictine order predates "the Catholic hierarchy" -- to employ the popular code, whiskey tango foxtrot? But Norris's genuine affection for the monks, for the landscape, and (yes) for most of her neighbors, does come through and make us forget the flaws. Almost.

On the Amazon scale of five stars, this book was about a three-point-nine.

Weighed and found (overweight but) wanting

That sums up my life to date! It's the Six-Word Memoir Meme, via The Digital Hairshirt. (A cool blog where you can go back in time to the 1970s with the Bee Gees, Donna Summer, and the late Van McCoy.)

The Daily Eudemon

has given us lists of things that are difficult, very difficult, and downright impossible to say while drunk. (Scroll down a wee bit.) Yes, #5 under Downright Impossible is quite true.

Seen

Written in the book of prayer petitions next to a statue of Our Lady in a Cambridge, Mass. church:

Inspirez B.H.O. qu'il désiste de son ambition et qu'il cède la place à H.R.C.

(Inspire B.H.O. to give up his ambition and yield to H.R.C.)

No comment!

Official business

Raises a vexed index to her chin, wondering she is, if she forgot to tell the mind, the man behind, the man behind the desk, with the name, with the big name, something.

74-77 degrees

The expected high temperature today (away from the water). I'll cope somehow.

Wilde

Eve alerts us to an essay by the Cigarette Smoking Blogger about Oscar Wilde: his aesthetics, sexuality, and eventual conversion to Catholicism.

But the most obvious fact about praise -- whether of God or anything -- strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of honour. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise unless (sometimes even if) shyness or the fear of boring others is deliberately brought in to check it. The world rings with praise -- lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favourite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favourite game -- praise of weather, wines, dishes, actors, motors, horses, colleges, countries, historical personages, children, flowers, mountains, rare stamps, rare beetles, even sometimes politicians or scholars. I had not noticed how the humblest, and at the same time most balanced and capacious, minds, praised most, while the cranks, misfits and malcontents praised least. The good critics found something to praise in many imperfect works; the bad ones continually narrowed the list of books we might be allowed to read. The healthy and unaffected man, even if luxuriously brought up and widely experienced in good cookery, could praise a very modest meal: the dyspeptic and the snob found fault with all. Except where intolerably adverse circumstances interfere, praise almost seems to be inner health made audible. [...] I had not noticed either that just as men spontaneously praise whatever they value, so they spontaneously urge us to join them in praising it: "Isn't she lovely? Wasn't it glorious? Don't you think that magnificent?" The Psalmists in telling everyone to praise God are doing what all men do when they speak of what they care about. My whole, more general, difficulty about the praise of God depended on my absurdly denying to us, as regards the supremely Valuable, what we delight to do, what indeed we can't help doing, about everything else we value.

C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, pp. 93-95

Am resisting

the urge to quote at further length from the chapter entitled "A Word about Praising" in C S Lewis's book Reflections on the Psalms. The tempting excerpt runs about two pages (from the bottom of page 93 to the beginning of page 96); a shorter excerpt would not do justice to Lewis's thought.

So, what to do? The choices are (1) Post a shorter excerpt; (2) Transcribe the whole blessed thing; (3) Neither -- simply recommend, exhort, urge!

Find a copy and, even if you are disinclined to purchase, read the chapter in question (pp. 90-98), and admire.

(I'll probably post some part of it soon.)

Today's feast

St Benedict Joseph Labre.

Wikipedia page.

From EWTN.

And New Advent's Catholic Encyclopedia entry.

Cummings

if up's the word;and a world grows greener
minute by second and most by more--
if death is the loser and life is the winner
(and beggars are rich but misers are poor)
--let's touch the sky:
                              with a to and fro
(and a here there where)and away we go

in even the laziest creature among us
a wisdom no knowledge can kill is astir--
now dull eyes are keen and now keen eyes are keener
(for young is the year;for young is the year)
--let's touch the sky:
                              with a great(and a gay
and a steep)deep rush through amazing day

it's brains without hearts have set saint against sinner;
put gain over gladness and joy under care--
let's do as an earth which can never do wrong does
(minute by second and most by more)
--let's touch the sky:
                              with a strange(and a true)
and a climbing fall into far near blue

if beggars are rich(and a robin will sing his
robin a song)but misers are poor--
let's love until noone could quite be(and young is
the year,dear)as living as i'm and as you're
--let's touch the sky:
                              with a you and a me
and an every(who's any who's some)one who's we

What do we mean when we say that a picture is "admirable"? We certainly don't mean that it is admired (that's as may be) for bad work is admired by thousands and good work may be ignored. Nor that it "deserves" admiration in the sense in which a candidate "deserves" a high mark from the examiners -- i.e., that a human being will have suffered injustice if it is not awarded. The sense in which the picture "deserves" or "demands" admiration is rather this; that admiration is the correct, adequate or appropriate, response to it, that, if paid, admiration will not be "thrown away", and that if we do not admire we shall be stupid, insensible, and great losers, we shall have missed something. In that way many objects both in Nature and in Art may be said to deserve, or merit, or demand, admiration. It was from this end, which will seem to some irreverent, that I found it best to approach the idea that God "demands" praise. He is that Object to admire which (or, if you like, to appreciate which) is simply to be awake, to have entered the real world; not to appreciate which is to have lost the greatest experience, and in the end to have lost all. The incomplete and crippled lives of those who are tone deaf, have never been in love, never known true friendship, never cared for a good book, never enjoyed the feel of the morning air on their cheeks, never (I am one of these) enjoyed football, are faint images of it.

C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, p. 92

Now they watch him and cringe.
Who are they? Who is he?

We decided to fly Chinese.
The food wasn't that good.

And oh Erwin did I tell you
that man -- the one -- I didn't

know if I was supposed to or not.
He crawled back listlessly,

holding a bunch of divas.

John Ashbery, from "As Umbrellas Follow Rain"

Bring on the aromatherapy
boys there's a job to get done

John Ashbery, from "Intricate Fasting"

Two bumper stickers
on the same car

EMBRACE LOVE

KEEP ABORTION LEGAL

[...] how constantly Our Lord repeated, reinforced, continued, refined, and sublimated, the Judaic ethics, how very seldom he introduced a novelty. This of course was perfectly well-known -- was indeed axiomatic -- to millions of unlearned Christians as long as Bible-reading was habitual. Nowadays it seems to be so forgotten that people think they have somehow discredited Our Lord if they can show that some pre-Christian document (or what they take to be pre-Christian) such as the Dead Sea Scrolls has "anticipated" Him. As if we supposed Him to be a cheapjack like Nietzsche inventing a new ethics! Every good teacher, within Judaism as without, has anticipated Him. The whole religious history of the pre-Christian world, on its better side, anticipates Him. It could not be otherwise. The Light which has lightened every man from the beginning may shine more clearly but cannot change. The Origin cannot suddenly start being, in the popular sense of the word, "original".

C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1958), pp. 26-27

"You obviously have a wonderful economy with words, Gloria. I look forward to your next syllable with great eagerness."

Sir John Gielgud, who played Hobson in Arthur, was born 104 years ago today.

Happy 69th birthday ...

... to Seamus Heaney!