Dickens & Bone

The older I get the more I think: "why read modern novelists when you can read Dickens?" The following delightful passage from Charles Dickens' Pictures of Italy reminds me of Ham of Bone's reaction to our first gathering at Tara Hall on St. Patrick's Day: wonderment that the ages mixed so innocently and that despite the alcohol flowing freely the congenial wholesomeness of the scene. Here Dickens writes of the final day of Carnival:

As the bright hangings and dresses are all fading into one dull, heavy, uniform colour in the decline of the day, lights begin flashing, here and there: in the windows, on the housetops, in the balconies, in the carriages, in the hands of the foot-passengers: little by little: gradually, gradually: more and more: until the whole long street is one great glare and blaze of fire. Then, everybody present has but one engrossing object; that is, to extinguish other people’s candles, and to keep his own alight; and everybody: man, woman, or child, gentleman or lady, prince or peasant, native or foreigner: yells and screams, and roars incessantly, as a taunt to the subdued, ‘Senza Moccolo, Senza Moccolo!’ (Without a light! Without a light!) until nothing is heard but a gigantic chorus of those two words, mingled with peals of laughter.

The spectacle, at this time, is one of the most extraordinary that can be imagined... Senza Moccolo! Senza Moccolo! Beautiful women, standing up in coaches, pointing in derision at extinguished lights, and clapping their hands, as they pass on, crying, ‘Senza Moccolo! Senza Moccolo!’; low balconies full of lovely faces and gay dresses, struggling with assailants in the streets; some repressing them as they climb up, some bending down, some leaning over, some shrinking back - delicate arms and bosoms - graceful figures - glowing lights, fluttering dresses, Senza Moccolo, Senza Moccoli, Senza Moc-co-lo-o-o-o! - when in the wildest enthusiasm of the cry, and fullest ecstasy of the sport, the Ave Maria rings from the church steeples, and the Carnival is over in an instant - put out like a taper, with a breath!

...

The game of the Moccoletti (the word, in the singular, Moccoletto, is the diminutive of Moccolo, and means a little lamp or candlesnuff) is supposed by some to be a ceremony of burlesque mourning for the death of the Carnival: candles being indispensable to Catholic grief. But whether it be so, or be a remnant of the ancient Saturnalia, or an incorporation of both, or have its origin in anything else, I shall always remember it, and the frolic, as a brilliant and most captivating sight: no less remarkable for the unbroken good-humour of all concerned, down to the very lowest (and among those who scaled the carriages, were many of the commonest men and boys), than for its innocent vivacity. For, odd as it may seem to say so, of a sport so full of thoughtlessness and personal display, it is as free from any taint of immodesty as any general mingling of the two sexes can possibly be; and there seems to prevail, during its progress, a feeling of general, almost childish, simplicity and confidence, which one thinks of with a pang, when the Ave Maria has rung it away, for a whole year.

We Interrupt This Blog...

...to bring a picture of girls drinking beer:



Gosh, the things I do for ratings. Believe me, I didn't want to have to post that. My dreams of professional bloggerdom have been stretched cruelly for going on seven years now and surely the lack of success is the lack of pictures of girls drinking beer...

While posting things seasonal, it's time for ye olde SchnitzelBank song and reportage concerning Oktoberfest.

Everything was especially piquant this year since it was in a new place: the Ohio Expo Center. Huge black draught horses paraded around us carrying a waving Miss Oktoberfest. Flugelhorns were being assembled on a table near me. A fake barrel of beer was being tapped and people rushed out to get a free 16-oz with glass mug (Ron said they would be plastic due to the inadvisability of giving drinkers glass mugs, but he would be proven wrong - score one against the lawyers). A 4-mile running race took off from nearby and the runners ran around our venue. Ron introduced me to a dear friend of his that he'd met this very night while standing in the beer line. Connie, a thin waif of a woman in her 60s who looked very Irish and who told us she was trying to gain weight, goes to all the festivals in town. Ron gave props to anyone wearing Steeler gear while I said that they'd lose to the Bengals the following Sunday (which proved to be true).

And now, Schnitzelbank!


That magic board where we all drunkenly hollar, 'Ja! Ja!' and mumble in between except for "Tannebaum" which everybody knows.


Funny hats R us!


"It makes learning German fun!"

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The most holy and important practice is...to take great pleasure that God is with you. - Brother Lawrence via "Word Among Us"

What I think I like most about Kathleen Norris is her comfort in accepting all the ebbing and flowing of the spiritual life, which any serious spiritual writer understands. We fall, we step back, we step forward, we feel embraced, we feel abandoned, we feel energized, we feel slammed on the ground. We feel paralyzed and puzzled. We feel – accidie. It’s okay. Just – and here is the lesson of monastic life – keep praying. Keep letting yourself be shaped by the Psalms.Keep serving and working. Pay attention. Believe, as Andre Dubus wrote in “A Father’s Story,” that God believes in you. ... One thing I found…missing in Norris’ book was an explicit consideration of eternal life. This wasn’t the purpose of the book, granted, but as she looks for hope, consolation and reasons to go on, this doesn’t seem to factor. Perhaps it is assumed. Probably. - Amy Welborn

I cannot imagine going through without God and without the Psalms (which is the intimate room of all Scripture) what [Joan] Didion went through with those two proximate deaths [her husband and daughter]. ... For so long I’ve affirmed a curious thing Pius XII said to a group of artists in 1952: “The function of all art lies in fact in breaking through the narrow and tortuous enclosure of the finite, in which man is immersed while living here below, and in providing a window to the infinite for his hungry soul.” - Commenter Bill Bannon on Amy Welborn's blog

Dear [Victoria's Secret], let me enumerate for you the reasons why I won't be purchasing anything from your skankalog. Believe it or not, it has nothing to do with any modesty concerns. I don't expect the 1933 Sears catalog from a company selling undergarments in 2009...you wanna be THE manufacturer of choice for the American woman? Then help us deal with the aftermath of wearing your stuff. Why don't you make nursing bras? - Mrs. Darwin's "cri de mamelon"

Thousands who have never learned to think at all are urged to think whatever may take their fancy about Jesus Christ. But they are, in fact, forbidden to think in any way but one about Abraham Lincoln. That is why it is worth remarking that it is a Catholic who has thought for himself. - GK Chesterton via Dylan at Dark October

Joseph Pearce noted that while mature Christians are not childish, they should still be child-like. He suggested that when God turned His back on Adam and Eve, he may have been laughing--as a parent might laugh after punishing a child. For God knew what was to come, and the glory that awaits us. "Ultimately the key to happiness is learning to love as God loves, and learn to laugh as God laughs." - Lee Strong of Chesterton and Friends on last month's Chesterton Conference, via Sancta Sanctis

Our dog is dying now of cancer and for the first three days of knowing it, it was harder than when my father died expectantly and then suddenly. And part of that was because Aquinas said that animals would not be in the resurrected world. Knowing Aquinas stem-to-stern but knowing that he really did not deal with Romans 8 which actually he contradicted, I began to read others and thankfully saw them as corrective….pets will be there with our families and of course they will not have the beatific vision but Aquinas saw no plants nor animals but only stones and stars in the resurrected world because he erroneously thought the stars were eternal naturally. - Commenter Bill Bannon on Amy Welborn's blog

"St. Jerome observed: 'we see priests forsaking the gospels and the prophets, reading stage-plays, and singing the love songs of pastoral idylls.' This is not to say that we can not have other studious interests, outside our primary focus, but they must be subordinate." (Mark Davoren OP)...You know the lyrics "He sees you when you're sleeping/ He knows when you're awake/ He knows if you've been bad or good/ So be good for goodness' sake"? They're supposed to warn children about a strangely omniscient Santa Claus--which is just ridiculous. It is hard to imagine the real St. Nicholas of Bari engaging in what can accurately be described as a form of spiritual espionage. On the other hand, I'd totally buy it about St. Jerome. I'd be good all the time, if I thought he were "making a list and checking it twice." - Sancta Sanctis

Excerpts

Happened across some beautiful lyricism recently, first in Michael Chabon's "Gentlemen of the Road" which serves it up tinged with humor:

...its bowl filled with a nasty-looking brown mixture, and when Hanukkah parted his cracked lips, the Frank struck a flint to the bowl of the pipe and encouraged Hanukkah to draw the thick, honeyed smoke into his lungs. Hanukkah coughed, and then drew again, and it was not long before he was aware of being filled, in rippling drizzles, by a stream of amber honey poured through his mouth and neck into the bottle of his soul.

Another from Chabon:

...forest and snow that Amram understood to be the habitations of witches and snow djinn and warrior women who rode on the backs of bears and of giant deer. In the wind was a promise only of ice, storm and advancing darkness, and Amram knelt on the northern slope of a strange mountain, far from home, drew his woolen cloak more tightly around his shoulders and knew in his heart that he would end his days in some winter kingdom, among wintry men. Then, as if overhearing and taking pity on the maudlin trend of his thoughts, the wind carried to his nostrils from the fires of the troops camped in the valley the desert tang of a camel-dung fire, and with it the plangent cry of a soldier-muezzin calling his saddle-weary brothers to a belated Jumuah. ... A pair of pickets held the southern approach to the camp, and there were guards posted on the north and west sides of camp, all fine, tall, falcon-faced men, in excellent equipage and reasonable order, but to Amram's eye as he had studied them and their fellows in the last of the daylight they betrayed an indifference to their duty, a hint of discontent, as if they had better things to do and expected no trouble or enemy from any quarter. Something was roiling them. He wondered if perhaps they suffered from the discontent of indolence, patrolling a frontier that had been at peace too long, the last war between the Khazars and the armies of the Caliph having been...

And via Steven Riddle's new blog, there's a taste of William Trevor's prose:

[referring to Ireland] They loved it in different ways: unspoken in the dark, that was another intimation. For Grattan there was history's tale, regrets and sorrows and distress, the voices of unconquered men, the spirit of women as proud as empresses. For Grattan there were the rivers he knew, the mountains he had never climbed, wild fuchsia by a seashore and the swallows that came back, turf smoke on the air of little towns, the quiet in long glens. The sound, the look, the shape of Ireland, and Ireland's rain and Ireland's sunshine, and Ireland's living and Ireland's dead: all that.

Stop Readin' the News....

My brother-in-law says he can't read the news anymore without getting apoplectic, most recently this. He says:

They're gonna partially fund healthcare reform by taxing medical devices over $100! Yet another hidden tax which we can't quatify -- GREAT IDEA! Opponents are concerned the tax might be passed on to consumers. WTF?!?!? Businesses don't pay a dime in taxes -- of course it will be passed onto consumers! It will specifically be disproportionately paid by Medicare, since seniors get more of these devices than anyone else! So they'll have the fed gov't paying the tax for the fed gov't to collect and pay the tax for the fed gov't to collect!

I'm thinking that our gift of a Democratic congress to Obama was just the mother of all mistakes. I don't blame the Democratic congress or Obama for being wild-eyed spenders, i.e. for being themselves. They didn't steal any elections, they won them by getting the most votes. We're getting the government we deserve, and it hoits.
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Have some delicious if distracting reads lately. The Machine is the story of the 1975 Reds season and is an example where the right writer gets hooked up with the right subject. Hard to put down. A lot on the personality of the Reds, the fueds, the excellences, the whole shebang. George Foster constantly reading the Bible and the manager thinks he's becoming a religious fanatic. It really doesn't get any better than this as the perfect light read.

Also been reading Richard Brookhiser's memoir and he can pack a lot in a little: "The evening of artists is an unhappy time." Speaking about studying George Washington and his time he writes: "Living in the eighteenth century neutralized a conservative poison, cynicism."

He calls WFB (as well as himself) a narcissist, and when undergoing treatment for cancer found his taste in music had conracted to just Bach and Louis Armstrong. Said he could read "only the angry", including Samuel Johnson's review of "an upbeat theodicy, 'A Free Enquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil' (he didn't like the enquiry, he didn't like evil, and he had his quarrels with nature)."

Having finished Our Lady of Guadalupe am looking for a new spiritual read. Surprising number of choices for Kindle. Ralph Martin's book on the doctors of the Church, a commentary on Mark's gospel, the Brother Lawrence book and Raymond Arroyo's book of Mother Angelica's thoughts on Scripture.

Lame Fiction Attempts

Aborted attempts at Fiction for a Monday with the reason for the stoppage in parenthesis:

Attempt Numero Uno:

It was our summer vacation and we were headed due south on the Ohio-to-SC turnpike, drinking day old Pepsi's that had outlived their usefulness. We drove around the state looking for potential real estate buys when we happened across an old dander of a town... (Here "dander" was a sign this attempt was DOA.)

Attempt II:

Five years ago I was on a Walmart book tour, punishment for having written "Memoir of a Walmart Greeter", which, as the title implies, gave a detailed account of the fictional life and times of Edgar Silverstein....(Great initial promise but then I hit writer's block.)

Attempt III:

Got a job in construction, mainly roads. Worked as a flagger when a two-laner went to one and it was fun checking out the girls as they drove by. Spent the days sniffin' asphalt so strong I'd be smellin' it for days after, like it was lodged in my nostrils or something. When it was hot we brought a pup tent for shade. But it wasn't really all that hot, which must've made Al Gore hot. Sometimes I operated the steam roller machine which spread out the black lava and made it smooth before it cooled. We took our time, did it right and because we were union. I'd stand out there all day till I couldn't stand no mo'. We used to play practical jokes on each other, like the time I rid in the backhoe. (This was my attempt to "write what you don't know".)

Attempt IV:

I'd always hoped, despite experience to the contrary, that the state of South Carolina had avoided modernity, or at least the last nine decades. I was under the impression that Columbia had been burned during the Civil War and that some of the buildings might be still smoldering. I hoped to catch a glimpse of Jefferson Davis walking with his family to his house with the thick maroon carpet and draperies, the latter full of decorative flourish. I longed to see live oaks with white pillared houses where you could hear the shouting of men arguing for secession. I wanted to see the southern belles with their ten-inch waists trying to fit in eight-inch corsets.

But when I drive there on the interstate, it looks like pretty much any other state. (Too non-fictiony.)

of Books & Plants

I like the idea of being able to write in "das Buchraum", that fragrantly faithful bookquariam. In there I glimpse the tan broadcoats of the Minutemen, the Britannica Encyclopedias who promise an answer to anything within a minute (assuming the question is answerable and doesn't relate to any knowledge acquired after 1911). Yes in there tis quiet and breezeless but I find it far too confining even on a intermittedly cool day like today...and so...

Went on a hike with our dog Buddy and the goldenrods were significantly less golden after a week's absence. Still it was nice, and still there was enough color to satisfy even if Uncle Mark semi-ruined the red by mentioning how the honeysuckles weren't native and were aggressively taking over the habitat. You've heared of nativists who dislike Hispanic immigrants from becoming demographically powerful? Same thing in the world of plants with Uncle Mark. His prejudice is catching - I find myself looking with disdain on the undocumented honeysuckles!

Cell phone photos from last week's hike:

Truth in Spamvertising

At last!:

Dis & Dat

Thoughts not deep enough to support their own post but too long for Twitter:____
There are times I'm greatly relieved I'm not a radio or television pundit. Say, in the aftermath of Michael Jackson's death. Or now in the wake of a quieter tempest regarding Roman Polanski. I'm especially disappointed that Morning Joe is beating that puppy since they're usually more serious. I daresay most people under the age of 40 have never heard of this "celebrity". The guy is a fugitive and he should've acted accordingly if he didn't want to get caught, i.e. stay in France where there's no extradition treaty. It's a tiny, tiny story getting ridiculous press. (Does this count?)
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David Brooks wrote a column recently dissing social conservatives and implying we were generally clueless of the real problem, economic spendthriftedness: "This erosion has happened at a time when the country’s cultural monitors were busy with other things. They were off fighting a culture war about prayer in schools, “Piss Christ” and the theory of evolution. They were arguing about sex and the separation of church and state, oblivious to the large erosion of economic values happening under their feet."

Note he didn't mention abortion, perhaps tacitly realizing that the death of a million babies in the womb would not bolster his argument of economics uber alles.
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Funny exchange this morning with my wife:

Her: "I love you!"
Me: "I love you more!"
Her: "'em's fighing words!"

Maybe you had to be there.
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Heard The Catholic Guy on XM channel 117 talk about meeting with his spiritual director or therapist and how he decided against accepting an offer from a major publishing house to write a book. Impressive. Now that's countercultural. Says he's already too involved in work and wants to devote more time to God. Go on retreats. Too much living live "exteriorly" via the distraction of work in order to avoid going inside and being still. He was also using his work to try to become "more worthy" of God's love and grace but notes that's not how it works.
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I'm tempted by the Fr. Rutler book on the St. John Vianney. In it he makes mention of the arduous path of sainthood and the modern way of dealing with this is partially simply to avoid saints. I immediately thought of how Graham Greene had an opportunity to meet Padre Pio and was too fearful to do so, knowing that he might have to change.
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Today's "moment of Zen", to use an especially inapt metaphor, was praying the Divine Infant of Prague novena. It opened in a new way the fact of the Incarnation and how He "restored to us our dignity". In that single line there was much fruitful meditation.

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Reading is not life. But for some of us reading is more than a leisure-time activity. Reading is real work--it is part of the formative work that goes into writing and it is a form of shifting from the day-job mind into the relaxation/replenishing mind. The creative required by reading is of a different type than that exercised during a day of putting out fires. What I've discovered is that I receive less and less pleasure from things that do not present some form of challenge. I've spent a lifetime in "leisure" reading--absorbing all sorts of fun things that almost immediately slip out of my head and make no real difference in my understanding of the One Thing Necessary (soon to be trademarked). - Steven of Flos Carmeli

Like the devil “I will not serve.” If I give myself entirely to God, reject evil completely, he might ask me to serve people who are perfectly capable of serving themselves (my children, my husband), people who are not weak and helpless, but actually flawed. I do not wish to expend my energy, which could be spent on my interests or on garnering the undemanding love of other people. This is the failure of my love. “The closer a person is to God, the closer he is to people.” (Pope Benedict) - Betty Duffy

On our own we simply cannot be good, and whether we realize it or not we rely entirely on God’s grace for all that we do. And more than that, God desires for us the sort of happiness and joy, even here on this earth, that we cannot even fathom. That joy is experienced when we encounter the abundant love that God has for us, when we realized that not only are we created by Him, but indeed we are loved immensely by Him, so much so that He became like us and died for us, so that the divisions we have placed between ourselves and Him can be broken down for good. And the way that we encounter this love most profoundly is by developing a life of prayer... But my point is simply that lately I have not been disciplined in this prayer life, and with me this always has profoundly negative effects on my spiritual outlook. I become more irritable, less motivated, and so forth. I go into that spiritual and psychological “bad place,” and it takes a lot of hard work to get myself out. The beauty, though, is that this hard work is not done alone, but rather is done in cooperation with the grace of God. - Michael at Psalm 46:11

Someone whose only charitable activity is writing checks will usually have a more distant experience of charitable action than someone who volunteers in a food pantry or crisis pregnancy center on a weekly basis. It's going to be hard for someone who _only_ gives money to experience at a human level the fact that the money he's making for a couple hours during his workday is going to help a particular cause. At the same time, however, I think it's important to recognize that donating time is not the only legitimate form of charity. - Darwin Catholic

It is surely true that Christ's command to clothe, feed, house, etc. the poor are meant as much or more for our eternal benefit than for the temporal relief of those helped. - commenter Kate on above Darwin Catholic quote

For traditional Christians, Jews and Muslims, the most advanced being in the universe is one who remembers every sin and deals with it justly. For the post-Christian world, an advanced being is someone more like Klaatu, who doesn’t care what we’re fighting about so long as we don’t drag it into his space. - Camassia

I remember when we were planning to move to Ohio, my siblings and I carefully wrote out a list of what we wanted in a house: wood floors, a fireplace, a secret passageway, a laundry chute -- marks of a home that was built quality, built to last...It did not occur to me as a child that some people would not value a beautiful older house in a beautiful older neighborhood. Perhaps the term "Victorian" applied to architecture had a particular allure because it was so different from where I lived. The concept of upkeep or the desire to flee a crime-ridden neighborhood despite the original glory of the houses were completely alien ideas, as were "white flight", "urban decay", or "factory closing". But I did know that in 100 years our trailer would be rubble (as indeed will the suburban box I now inhabit), whereas even at their century, the gorgeous homes that were built for living and built to last still cast spells even through a heavy haze of neglect. - Mrs. Darwin

Reminds me of how I resisted joining the KofC for so long. I would just reply, "Nah, I don't want to help you run a gambling drinking joint". - Commenter on Darwin Catholic post

Perhaps we ought to separate asking God for things we want and thanking Him for things we get...we thank God for allowing us to ask Him for things, for the grace by which we've just asked for one particular thing, and for whatever good He does in our lives in answer to our prayer. But that's just a special case of the more general "Prayer of Thanksgiving" process, in which we thank God for everything He gives us. Breaking the supplication-obtaining-thanksgiving chain teaches us to be thankful, not just when we get what we ask for (like children), and not even when we don't get what we ask for (like philosophers), but when we get anything at all. - Tom of Disputations

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Fellow midwesterners will note the serious degradation in temperatures, first of the season. We're looking at highs of 65, 56, and 61, numbers of a dimension that won't allow denial of the obvious: summer ist kaputt. If it were a horse we'd shoot it. Tis disturbing, made worse by a ridiculous graphic I saw during Sunday's Bengals game: 133 days till the Superbowl. The ridiculous over-hype now begins 133 days early. That's even a longer time period than between the pre-Christmas sales and Christmas. Of course the graphic reminded me about how long 133 days are, and how that won't even get us out of the winter season. But then I remembered yesterday was the feast of the Nagasaki matyrs and how one 12-year old boy enroute to his crucifixion told someone who was crying: "Sing an 'Our Father' and die like a man." Ouch. Out of the mouths of babes.

The song goes that in Heaven there is no beer, but I'm hoping it will be sunny and doggish (link via Bill Luse).
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I happened across the Facebook page of an old friend's wife yesterday and was interested to see he's apparently resisted the Facebookian pull given he wasn't a friend on his wife's page. It's interesting to see the ol' social climber isn't hip to the new social media. Perhaps his ambition's cooled or perhaps he's simply too busy to network. (Not that networking is the only use obviously or even the primary use.) Inquiring minds wanna... There's nothing more satisfying than finding out a little piece of gossip, be it ancestor gossip (we genealogists call this 'research') or Facebook findings.
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Now it can be told!: Enjoying the sweet smell of grass cuttings on the back patio and the glow of the porch lights against the broad expanse of said patio. I'm having a pseudo-beer, O'Doul's, and am looking forward to watching Bill O'Reilly.
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Today's Godincidence: I'm reading an email from a charismatic Catholic blog-friend. She's refuting suggestions that praise of Satan occasionally comes out in tongues. I head to the bathroom with my Kindle, open up the first (free) chapter of Mother Angelica's book on Scripture, and Raymond Arroyo in the introduction mentions how her love for the Word came after she was "baptized in the Spirit".

Sunday, Sunday

4pm is the new 6pm, given the earlier-ending days, so I headed out at that hour for an hour bike ride. But the real gemstone of the day was hiking at a local park with Buddy, the sun reminding me of my last trip here when the world was my oyster - or at least the lake at Prairie - where I glided through the sylvan waters on my canoe chariot.

We hiked this time against a lakean backdrop amid breathtaking fields of goldenrods and I thought with satisfaction how weeds could look so pretty. We garden and prepare the soil when here nature herself, with no assistance from us, makes these to bloom. I took in the satisfying mix of plants and trees and flowers and it pleased me to think that any given particular growing thing might've been inadvertently planted by birds, through their droppings. The seemingly random profusion of blooms was the handiwork of wind and birds and I enjoyed and applauded their efforts. It made me hungry to read some Annie Dillard.

Having gotten enough of lake and sun, I hiked to the dense tree-line and put my head into one clearing to take in a breath and a view but found my face full of spider web. Momentarily annoyed, it occurred to me nonetheless that the poor spider would have to begin her work again. But what else do spiders have to do? I thought. Then I recalled the monk who burned his baskets and I figured it wrong to think of the spider's work as meaningless. The tendency to regard nature as meaningless can easily leach into our thinking about humans, such that Terri Schiavo's life might be seen as worthless. God cares even about the least of his creation else he'd not have created it. At the risk of sounding more solipsistic than usual, perhaps the reason the spider spun that web was so that I may get entangled in it and think about God's providence. As one priest put it, "God's care extends beyond the human family to the whole family of creation. All creation is good. There is no dichotomy between the secular and the sacred. God loves all creatures."

Greek Christian Poetry for $200 Alex

Liked this first reading from Mass yesterday:

"So now, the Lord of Hosts says this:

'Reflect carefully how things have gone for you. You have sown much and harvested little; you eat but never have enough, drink but never have your fill, put on clothes but do not feel warm. The wage earner gets his wages only to put them in a purse riddled with holes. So go to the hill country, fetch wood, and rebuild the House: I shall then take pleasure in it, and be glorified there, says the Lord.'"

Liked the witty truth of "wages put in a purse riddled with holes". Especially easy to see now that we know all our currencies are as substantial as flim-flam.

But the real beauty is "Go to the hill country..." for that is what Mary did just after conceiving Jesus, and she did begin to rebuild His House and indeed the Father took pleasure and was gloried in the Son, and indeed in the Old Testament there was much sowing but little harvesting and drinking but not having a feeling of fullness, for in the OT you could not yet see and taste God.
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Our cheery Dominican substitute friar today read Matthew 16 about building the Church on Peter the rock, a special reading due to commemorating 150+ years since the original dedication of the church. I thought of the many generations and how even though so much of the interior has changed over the years, I wanted to know that the altar was in the same place, that that was and is holy ground, and that this was a place of refuge for so many before me such that might help put into perspective our gnat-length'd lives. And when the priest used the following analogy (the one I'd thought I'd come up), I smiled; he spoke about the saints on the sidelines and in the grandstands rooting us on here on earth. I couldn't help but think they were cheering him on right now, thanking him for his cheerful giving and urging the rest of us to do the same.
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Speaking of giving, I was inspired by Betty Duffy's latest. Nobody does it better though sometimes I wish I would. I found myself thinking that Betty was right (especially after perusing this) and that she shouldn't go over and "enable" her friend's lazy behavior (pot, kettle, I know), but then that could be because I'm not as good a Christian.
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I did not know that the great theologian St. Gregory of Nazianzus had written poetry or that he had struggled with great physical and spiritual ills, or that he was of a "highly sensitive temperament...liable to despondency and irritability, constitutionally timid, and somewhat deficient, as it seemed, both in decision of character and in self-control." Capax Dei!

Oktoberfest!

Eins, zwei, drei, vehr, who's going to buy the beer? Me, at Oktoberfest. Ron's coming and it's my turn to buy. It wouldn't be fall without a little Klaber, would it? And their new theme is inspired: "Let's Get Klabbered!". How many ways can one euphemistically refer to getting liquored up? My, let me count the ways.

את מבנה האתר שינינו מעט

What to make of Qaddafi's 90+ minute rambling speech at the UN? Perhaps he's following the suggestion found in Mark Helprin's Digital Barbarism, that a little long-windedness in a soundbyte culture never hurt anyone. Helprin's intentional obliqueness extends as far as offering us untranslated Hebrew text on the dedication page (hence the title of this post). In the preface he says that the chapter titles are opaque by design:

"[this book] is partly a memoir that is in service of a principle it espouses - that man need not model himself, the way he lives, and by derivation even his arguments, after machines."

Okay admittedly that's quite a leap from Qaddafi expounding on jet lag and who killed JFK, other than to say his lack of coherence was not at all machine-like. Helprin writes,

"in its complexity, mystery, intelligence, and beauty, humanity is unexcelled as a masterwork of God and nature. Why then must its qualities be filtered from argument and cleansed from reason as if they were pollutants?"