View from the hotel balcony...

Friday Quick Hits

Recent tweets & retweets!

"Marilyn Monroe, an avid reader, would have turned eighty-five yesterday. See what's on her bookshelf."

*

Dogfish Head Raison D’Être: In the world of beer, there are Belgians and there are Germans.

*

"It’s fun when I discover a new musical group while trolling the hidden corners of the internet. Give them a try: ABBA." - Steve Martin tweet.

*

Tressel: Christian under fire.

*

"I find it funny that most priests complaining about the new translation are the same ones who change the words we have now." - Fr. Charles OFM

*

I think of Detroit as close to dead, but it appears to still have a great art museum amid the ruins.

*

"Overheard, in song: 'The Lord is kinda merciful.'" - Fr. Charles tweet

*

#Amazon Reveals the Most #WellRead Cities in #America

*

"Tonight's meditation: Double-Stuffed Oreos should just be called Oreos, and regular Oreos should be called Diet Oreos." - David Pogue

*


How Jay Nordliner Stopped Worrying and....

*

Artsy, museum-going men are happier, new study says. (And not always gay!)

*

"When I was a kid, the Dead Sea was only sick."

This & That

Went on a Heather King blog binge yesterday, lapping up two or three weeks’ worth in a single sitting. It was the next best thing to reading one of her books. She has a knack for finding great obscure quotes as well, such as meditations on the cross in Christian life by a French murderer and subsequent penitent.

*

The rank sun shines as I trudge/jog two miles. How woefully out-of-shape I am! But I plug on. Yesterday I carried 40-lb bags of mulch around the yard and am reminded how those carrying extra weight in the form of flab are, in some weird sense, athletes. It's a challenge carrying it!

*

There is no pint in going on,
when three I've had and more for sure,
next beer I drink I may well don.

*

Read yesterday's Dispatch and methodically gobbled up all the travails of resigned-in-infamy coach Jim Tressel of Ohio State. Then I consumed a Sports Illustrated article on the same. Deeply interesting to me given his charitable spirit, and famous Christian rectitude. I guess he thought the stakes were worth it - i.e. to lie to the NCAA in exchange for a possible national championship. Or, more charitably, he wanted to protect his players, despite his players being mostly spoiled brats. It's strange to think that he thought the university wouldn't read his emails when his email address is on OSU's domain.

*



Hilton Head beckoneth. Three days from now we'll be on the road. Would like to stop somewhere on the way down, preferably near some hiking trails, but it seems many of the parks along the way don't look any different from southeastern Ohio. Certainly none look quite like that one-of-a-kind forest primeval that is the Great Smokies. Good hiking places = anything west and south of Colorado and anything in the Great Smokies National Park. To detour to the Real Thing would be an extra two hours, which I suppose is possible. The other option is a park in West Virginia which is the "crown jewel of West Virginia parks" though that might like being the best '12 Republican presidential candidate. Just kidding WV!

*

With the dentist, you just try to hie through an obstacle course of x-rays and visual examinations and hope your teeth pass muster. You're at cross purposes: the dentist's living depends on finding problems, while you hope he finds none. But it sure beats the alternative: tooth aches and teeth pulls.

Politics, '12 Style

So we Republicans have often bamboozled and befuddled ourselves by a tendency to pick the trooper, the guy who's waited his turn, be it George HW Bush or Bob Dole or John McCain. Turn-waiting is overrated.

I've been looking more seriously at Tim Pawlenty, but he's a bit too much of a standard-issue military industrialist it seems to me and from what I've heard he's unwilling to tell the truth about Afghanistan:

"Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty said the country should try to decrease its troop levels in Afghanistan within the next two years, but only if conditions allow it."

Conditions, of course, will never allow it, given that the nation's longest war shows no markers of victory.

I don't much like Ron Paul's it's-America's-fault-for- everything-that-happens attitude, but am tempted towards a protest vote for him.

Pawlenty's pro-life credentials don't strike me as poor enough to throw the Minnesota governor overboard, but he seems to have waffled on waterboarding, first being against it before he was for it.

The trick to being a happy voter is to not look at any of the candidates too closely. Pretend you didn't read this.

Ian Hunter on C.S. Lewis

Found here:

The distinguished American novelist, Walker Percy, once remarked on the countless converts who had come to Catholicism through the writings of C. S. Lewis: Walker Percy wrote: "....[in stories told by Catholic converts] writers one might expect, from Aquinas to Merton, turn up. But guess who turns up most often? C. S. Lewis."

Yet Lewis himself never converted; he lived, and died (in November 1963) a lifelong Anglican.

In 1999, Joseph Pearce wrote a book called Literary Converts, a study of the veritable stampede to Rome of English authors and intellectuals in the twentieth century; men like G. K. Chesterton, Ronald Knox, Evelyn Waugh, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Malcolm Muggeridge. I reviewed Literary Converts when it came out and nominated it as the best Christian book of the year. More recently, Pearce wrote another book, this one called C. S. Lewis and the Catholic Church, and I reviewed that too. In this book, Pearce tries to find the answer to the Lewis paradox; namely, why has C. S. Lewis influenced so many Catholic converts and yet never himself become a Catholic?

Despite Pearce's diligent research, and his insightful and balanced reflections, the answer, I believe, eludes him. Pearce's answer – that Lewis was never able to shake off his virulently anti-Catholic Belfast upbringing – I consider unconvincing. I know that kind of upbringing: I experienced something not altogether different myself. It is an obstacle, unquestionably, but not an insurmountable one.

I believe that the answer is much simpler: in the nineteen forties, fifties and early sixties, when Lewis lived and his influence was at its height, it was still possible to regard the Church of England (particularly in its Anglo­Catholic manifestations) as part of that "...one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church" that all Christians, when they recite the Nicene Creed, profess to believe in.

Freedom's Dynamic Duo

Read successive posts from the great Heather King and Betty Duffy and thought, "now that's what I'm talking about."

I loved HK's fierce declaration of independence in the writing life. I thought that going to Patheos seemed too predictable a path, too..."blog hip". I'd rather a thousand flowers bloom in their stark individuality. So no branding for her and she's willing to take the punishment in terms of lesser number of readers.

Betty Duffy's post on Walker Percy's The Moviegoer ends on a similar independent note:

Binx’s search draws him to Kate, a broken woman who can give him no guarantee of happiness, a woman whose great epiphany is that “a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself. One is free.”

Personally, I’d prefer, for the time being, to remain “Betty Duffy.”

Books of Summer

I’m overlooking the vast horde and hope I remember to bring one fat novel in particular to the Head of Hilton: the one by William F. Buckley’s brother Reid. I read about 10% of the long book yet it still strangely resonates. I suspect I like the idea of that novel more than the actual reading of it. It sits fat on my shelf. Other physical books vying for Hilton Head status include the Oddie biography of Chesterton, the Stan Musial bio, and countless others! I’m hungry for more Joseph Pearce on Shakespeare as well. The only negative about reading is that it seems like you have to Read So Much to get to that snippet meant for you.

On Oddie’s biography of Chesterton, GKC’s childhood was filled with wonder such that it’s not too surprising he became the “wonder prophet”. It feels a bit deterministic, as if he were fated to be exactly who he was. Are we all merely extensions of our childhood, either reactions against it or emanations from it? You can certainly see the seeds (or even saplings) of who he would be in childhood. He was a romantic, preferring Shakespeare, Dickens and Scott.

Poetry Sunday

Emblazon on, oh sun, blaze on
as perfumed air lifts its burning
maple head, and undiluted Summer
lay upon my patio stones.

Blaze on, oh altar incense, blaze on
as perfumed prayers lift their smoky
longings and undiluted God
lay upon our mortal flesh.


*


I remember Aunt Mary
and her hermitage on Hooven
and the sounds of doves
on otherwise quiet mornings
and that bank of books
leather-jacketed but long unread
(for her eyes had gone bad).

I remember Aunt Mary,
who lived simply
and died simply
without a fuss,
for all her desperations were quiet.

I remember Aunt Mary,
who lacked the world’s props:
of long walks or bike-rides,
or pints of beer or shots of whiskey
no European trips or internet companions
nothing but the television and it’s glassy glow
and God, when she could feel Him.

Memoir (to be continued)

PREFACE

I was born in 1963 and childhood, naturally, followed. Having been asked to produce a memoir of my early years despite a poor memory and a general distaste for the childhood memories of my contemporaries, I will nevertheless attempt a book-length review of my early life.

Perhaps my current dislike for struggle comes from having had to do so from such an early age. Colic produced a massive release of stress hormones, and studies show cortisol blood level remain high for some months and years afterward.

And yet who could dismiss those early memories? Having little sense of “this happened when I was five, and that happened when I was six” I can only peg a general feel for the time with the music associated with it. I remember Gary Lewis and the Playboys singing “This Diamond Ring”; if that was popular in 1967, then I can remember when I was four.

My early literary influences were viewed uncritically. I read “A Light in the Forest”, which sort of encapsulated the-then fetish for Native American nobility (recall the conscience of the nation was then a tearful Indian concerning the environment) and the rancidness of Western civilization. At 25, I was donating copies of “A Light” to childrens' libraries and buying copies for my nieces and nephews. There was a sense in which something that was “of me” was inherently good and thus worth passing on. Such self-patriotism - my favorites right or wrong - now seem to strike the wrong note.

PROLOGUE

It's beyond the scope of this post to construct a day-by-day account of the year I was seven or eight or nine. But I will try, at the risk of trying the reader's patience.

The grass held a special kind of dew that morning when...

TV Shows

My favorite show on television seems the least likely: “Swamp People” on the History Channel. It takes you into another world, away from your brother-in-law’s divorce and the quotidian of daily corporate life and into the natural world of the swamps of southern and central Louisiana. It’s a window into the Cajun culture, epitomized perhaps mostly strongly by Troy, an accented alligator hunter. The latest episode strayed from the all gator, all the time format into frog-hunting and shrimp-catching and snake-grabbing. And occasionally there’s a wide sweeping shot of the swamps from the air, and it’s beautiful in all its high definition goodness.

It was also the finale of Dancing With the Stars Season 12, or season 2 for my wife and me. I get a kick out of how short Brooke’s interviews with the stars are: it’s cotton candy for short attention spans like mine. It makes O’Reilly’s short interviews look like collegiate seminars by comparison. The success of the show seems to be at least partially due to the fact that people like to look at attractive people. Add to that the elements of dance and music and you have at least part of what made musicals like “Singin’ in the Rain” so popular. Good music, good stars and good movement = the makings of good entertainment, almost regardless of plot. In this case the favorite, Hines Ward, won. Not too surprising; the football players overachieve here (perhaps because women like to reward he-men for having the balls to ballroom dance).

From Universalis & the Pope

On the feast of St. Philip Neri:

Laughter is not much heard in churches: perhaps that is to be expected... but outside church, Christians should laugh more than anyone else – laugh from sheer joy, that God bothered to make us, and that he continues to love us despite the idiots we are. Everyone is a sinner, but Christians are sinners redeemed – an undeserved rescue that we make even less deserved by everything we do. It is too serious a matter to be serious about: all we can reasonably do is rejoice.

And from Benedict, on Abraham's prayer.

Boss, Boss, No Plane, No Plane

Un-bowl-lievable line from a review of Among the Truthers: A Journey Through America’s Growing Conspiracist Underground, by Jonathan Kay:

But the British Truther and former MI5 agent David Shayler easily wins the prize for the most far-fetched theory; he believes that “no planes were involved in 9/11.” (In fact, he says, they were giant holograms.)

And, an honorable mention:

A young construction worker from Brooklyn called Luke Rudkowski must have won the record for multiple conspiracy beliefs, when in April 2007 he asked Zbigniew Brzezinski in a public meeting: “How do the American people know that 9/11 wasn’t staged, wasn’t engineered by you, David Rockefeller, the Trilateral Commission, the Committee on Foreign Relations, and the Bilderberg Group, sir?” (I love the deferential little appellation “sir” at the end of this accusation of mass murder.)

The Flâneur

He considers the boulevards ideal for thinking,
so he takes the air on a weekday evening
to best appreciate the crisis of modern life.

I thought I would try this for a while,
but instead of being in Paris, I was in Florida,
so the time-honored sights were not available to me
despite my regimen of aimless strolling-

no kiosks or glass-roofed arcades,
no beggar with a kerchief covering her hair,
no woman holding her hat down as she crossed a street,
no Victor Hugo look-alike scowling in a greatcoat,

no girls selling fruit or sweets from a cart,
no prostitutes circled under a streetlamp,
no solitude of the moving crowd
where I could find the dream of refuge.

...

Who needs Europe? I muttered into my scarf
as a boy flew by on a skateboard
and I fell into a reverie on the folly of youth
and the tender, distressing estrangement of my life.

-Billy Collins

The Sea!

A Bouguereau:

Sigh

"[Harold] Camping said his prediction that the Rapture would occur Saturday might have been wrong, but he stands by his prophecy that the world will come to an end as forecast on Oct. 21." --via ABC News

To Billy Joel tune "Honesty":

Humility...is just so hard to find
Everyone is so darn proud...
Humility is hardly ever heard
but mostly what I need from me...