James Wolcott's Lucking Out

Spent much of Monday afternoon curled up with a good Kindle. Doesn't have the same ring, 'eh? I was reading James Wolcott's memoir of Pauline Kael and life in '70s New York. His prose is electric and often poetic. It's pretty amazing he can write like that for such a sustained burst. There's certainly a reason he makes a living doing it. Funny thing is I'd never head of him before; I simply thought that I'd like to learn more about what it was like living in Manhattan during the '70s.

Some excerpts:

The dance critic Deborah Jowitt had the fine-boned fortitude of a frontier settler with eyes forever fixed on future horizons;
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The classical music critic Leighton Kerner, with his stooped posture and ever-present briefcase, resembled a sad pachyderm covering Willy Loman’s old rounds.
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Office renovation removed private sanctuaries for a more open cubicle layout that allowed greater visibility for frank exchanges of differing opinions that could be overheard the length of the floor, depending on wind conditions.
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A lesson it would take me a while to learn was that nothing makes writers happy for very long, there are always ravens pecking on the roof.
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I don’t regret my days in gladiator school. Having your ego slapped around a bit helped the blood circulate and would prove a superb conditioning program for a future sub-career in blogging, where a tough hide would come in handy every time the Hellmouth opened. Every time I’m abused online with a battery of scurrilous remarks of a personal nature, I’m able to let them bounce off like rubber erasers, having been called an asshole by professionals, experts in the field.
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I was too untutored in the art of deference, oblivious to the danger signs, and lackadaisical in the time-honored mime of looking busy when there was a significant lull in the action.
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Pauline agreed with Nabokov’s contention that sentimentality and brutality were the flip sides of a subservient mind.
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De Niro’s entrance into the Little Italy bar to the sound of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” one of the great character intros in movie history, the rest living up to its kinetic promise, a film in which Catholic guilt earned its own dressing room.
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In the Blue Bar there were no table bells to ring, leaving you sitting stranded, making little hand wriggles to attract the attention of waiters who struck neoclassical poses at the bar like chipped pieces of statuary, to borrow an image from the novelist Anthony Powell.
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Her sexual forthrightness was the flip side of the pickup-artist swagger Pauline found so amusing, and here she was, seated on the edge of Pauline’s bed in the Royalton, looking up at me with licky eyes, as if I were that night’s barbecue special, or was that my tropical imagination?
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In her review of West Side Story, she talked about the unendurable vexation of dating someone whose movie tastes you didn’t share. “Sex is the great leveler, taste the great divider,” she wrote.

A Diary By Any Other Name....

Reading a bit of "Sex and the Soul", an expose of the sordid state of the college hookup culture and how spirituality and religion fit in (or don't, as the case may be). The thing that comes out loud and clear is that evangelicals take religion & spirituality seriously while those at Catholic colleges don't. But I came across a line in Marcus Grodi's "Journeys Home" about how a convert slowly became convinced that God's not as limited as we think He is by individual and institutional weakness. But not sure "Sex and the Soul" is particularly helpful in improving my sense of hopefulness!

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Work came briefly to a halt while I awaited an answer from someone in another area. So I listened to a payday Friday company radio show. It's interactive; you can instant message responses and naturally I always try to be clever enough to get a mention on air. They were talking technology but got off on a tangent about this ugly (in my view) Russian hat one of the speakers was wearing. They asked the listeners if anyone knew what type it was, and I said, "a chastity enforcing hat". No comment from the hosts on that, naturally. My other response was about Bob, a guest who was late to the gate and was scheduled to speak about new technology finds at a trade show in Vegas. I said he was, "broke and hungover". Not especially funny but I figure you throw enough out there something will schtick. No mention on that one either.

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So the bitter season of cold arrives. On the bright side - literally - it's noticeably brighter outside. We've had a fine run of mild weather, and I'm mildly pleased that there wasn't more snow today (we got merely a dusting). We've certainly had the easiest winter - so far! - I can recall more or less ever. But the temp has dropped like Wile E. Coyote in a Roadrunner cartoon: down to 17 from a relatively balmly 42.

The barren trees wave in the wind while I listen to appropriate music: "Hildegard of Bingen" by "O Ecclesia". Very Middle Ages-ish. Early music is bereft of extraneous instrumentation much like the scene outside is bereft of leaf or ornamentation.

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Odd website of "anarchist, feminist Christian" who seems obsessed with boobs. I assume it's a variant of that feminist obsession with vaginas, as prompted by the play "The Vagina Monologues". She's interesting though; is studying theology which makes her intrinsically interesting. Not a Scott Hahn fan but is reasonable enough not to want to come off as snobby, just saying he doesn't seem to have scholarly credentials.

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Spent a couple hours and finished "Open City". I'm getting better at reading novels, a dubious skill at best. I've reverted back to the days of the late '80s and early '90s when I fairly regularly consumed them: Dickens, Updike, Laurie Colwin etc... Now I'm reading them at a much more rapacious rate, at least by my standards.

"Open City" is a post-modern novel, a stream of consciousness, and therefore plotless. Which doesn't bother me much - plot is bonus. I read not for characterization but for the poetry of the thing. And this had much poetry as many reviewers point out. But it also had a real tinge of sadness throughout which some reviewers also mentioned. A mixed bag: a lot of beauty but too many downbeat notes. Cole wrote so movingly of going to a concert of Mahler's Ninth Symphony that it gave me a real hunger to experience a classical music concert again. It's been so long! Arguably the main character of the book is the city itself, New York City, with all it's gaudy, familiar-unfamiliar beauty.

Now I get to pick another read! I'm thinking maybe "White Teeth" by Zadie Smith. Or finish up the re-read of Percy's "Love in the Ruins". A re-try of "Swamplandia" is possible too.

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Got sidetracked during prayer - or maybe not - when I thought of the poor Rupperts, a family of 11 shot by an uncle in Hamilton, Ohio in 1975. Hearing about that was one of the scariest and awfulest things of my youth. It occurred to me that I should pray for the victims and perpetrator, neither of which I can ever recall doing. Through the magic of the 'net, I found the current owner. It takes some gumption to buy a house where you can still see the bloodstains in the basement ceiling. There's also the obligatory rumors of it being haunted.

Sometimes I wonder how ex-spy Robert Hannsen is doing in his solitary confinement in a Colorado maximum security prison. He's there with Islamic terrorists who are said to often scream, cry, or pray. I wonder if he's making any progress spiritually. The former Opus Dei member still has his wife faithfully praying for him. I just wonder how he deals with life so radically changed.

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The truck, despite never getting much use, still manages to break down in myriad ways. The emergency brake is sticking now, and we were going to try to fix it ourselves (if we could) in the 18 degree weather and so we got out there, couldn't find the jack easily (i.e. without removing the spare, it seemed) and so we said, 'let's take it to the shop". Thank God. A couple months ago squirrels had set up a nest under the hood and eaten the transmission wires, so that was costly. Truck is starting to seem more trouble than it's worth. Anyway, feel like I dodged a bullet in not having to deal with it today.

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Two Hearted ale does a heart good.

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They say only 10% of Catholics regularly confess their sins, and of the 10% I wonder how many confess sins of omission. I'd say less than one tenth of 1%. Dreamt I was waiing in line at a big McDonald's where I'm going to confess my sins to the Pope! Only the ground rules are a bit different (besides the odd location)...he's requesting every penitent preach a homily.

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Already feeling the want of a new novel. Continued my search; many candidates but after "interviewing" many (by reading the first chapter) I found most wanting. I started off with the list of best novels of 2011, then 2010, according to WaPo and the NY Times and such. I've gotten extremely lucky with the last four novels I've read, by Arthur Philips, Jeffrey Eugenides and Teja Cole.

It looks like the last remaining novelistic survivors include "The Sense of an Ending" by Julian Barnes and Michael Houellebecq's "The Map and the Territory".

This minutiae brought to you by Nike, where the slogan is "Just Read It!"

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Non-fiction wise I'm reading Scott Hahn's academic journal on the nature of biblical inspiration. It's a series of essays by authors known and unknown. Occasionally heavy, needlessly convoluted and/or repetitious, it's something I'm reading for the gem-like line here or there. Gotta kiss a lot of frogs, as they say.

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The world is my oyster, goes the line and sometimes I feel the Kindle world is my library. Still, the one book I feel hunger to read, May Sarton's "Recovering", is unavailable on Kindle. I'll have to wait for it to be delivered or maybe see if it's at the library. Speaking of which, check out this near erotic love of libraries written by a blogger I follow:

"No mat­ter how many times I visit the library, the premise of it con­tin­ues to slay me. I can walk into an archi­tec­tural­ly inter­est­ing build­ing and I can read the books from here for free. FOR FREE. I can indis­crim­i­nate­ly tug titles from shelves, read the inner flap -- or not -- and make a stack in my arms. And then I can scan them in a way that thrills my inner 9-year-old who must have, must have, played librar­i­an at some point, take them home, rub my eye­balls all over them and then return them. Libraries. My god. A girl could lose her mind."

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Went to store to pick up beer and cereal, the two main staples of my diet. Call them the irreplaceables. Weather is overcast as a working day is long but I listen to jazz, the music of choice. It's just so damn cheerful! Less kind souls might call it "elevator music" but I call it music to lift one's spirit on a cloud-full day! Ohioans for jazz.

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I think this weekend was the beer tasting at the Columbus convention center. Ach, I forgot, but I think it was Saturday at 7:30 and I was shortly thereafter watching a pro football game (Denver-Pats) that turned immediately into a route, the way cotton candy immediately dissolves in your mouth upon contact. Steph said that she doesn't enjoy football too much because it makes her anxious. Indeed. And you got to watch a lot of games before you get the pay-off, that transcendent game that seemingly transfigures existence around it. I felt that after last weekend's Pittsburgh/Denver match-up. There was something so satisfying about the unlikely result, the achingly symbolic win of good guy Tebow over bad boy Big Ben. It felt a proxy for the war we're all in, the war of good against evil, and it's a spur to the virtue of hope to see good win once in awhile.

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"All American Muslim" is one those "reality" shows and I've found it compulsively watchable. The original reality show, Survivor", I found unwatchable, but since then reality television has gone to interesting places, like in the swamps of Louisiana ("Swamp People"), a fishing boat in Alaska ("Hook, Line and Sisters") and now the Dearborn, MI Muslim community.

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Mostly lazy day, yesterday's off day for MLK. Went to church in the a.m. and afterwards slumped into the recliner and leisurely read the newspaper on Kindle while sipping java. Purblind bliss. Also read a fine blog post by Steve Gershom that linked to a riveting section of "Surprised by Joy" by C.S. Lewis...

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One of the mundane activities is getting one's hair cut. Interesting talk though from Barb the barber. Her daughter-in-law got in a fight with her son over a trivial matter on Christmas Day. She (the daughter-in-law) calls the police, the police arrest her because she left fingermarks on his face. She has to spend Dec 25th, 26th in jail because of the federal holiday. It feels of poetic justice, and yet force & punishment are not the answer. When D. (the daughter-in-law) was a child, her mother used to hit her in the face when she misbehaved and it seemed to have absolutely no impact on her then or now. We see also in criminals how such a high percentage of them complain of being innocent. Crime doesn't pay, but neither does punishment. It seems to me the reason to have jails is for protection of others rather than for purposes punitive. Purgatory without sorrow for sin is meaningless, but with sorrow is extraneous... similarly prison. Or so from my perspective.

Rss Roundup

These two posts in my feed were appropriately bundled together, one from Maureen in Dayton and the second from Ralph Waldo Emerson, hopefully in Heaven:

Sigh

Re: "I will insist on a military so powerful no one would think of challenging it." - Mitt Romney

Sheesh Louise, we already spend more than the rest of the world combined.

Sheesh Louise, we've just fought in two decade-long wars.

Sheesh Louise, I think the secret to voting cheerfully is to not pay too much attention to what candidates say.

Much Ado, Perhaps

I'm becoming increasingly skeptical of the old Latin adage "Lex orandi, lex credendi", especially in the context of the "for the many" controversy in the words of consecration.

And now I see Friar Minor writes of the poverty and ineffectuality of words, at least compared to the Word:

I decided to pray one of the new Mass forumularies for the dead this morning, offering the Mass for the the recently deceased father of one of the friars. Requiescat in pace.

After Mass I was thinking about how the prayers seemed like an improvement, and how they were more supplicative and contained less presumption about the deceased having already arrived at the beatific vision. But you know what? When I went back and looked at the old prayers, they weren't much different. I thought I would be writing a post about how the new prayers better recognized continued purification after death and the need to pray for the dead on their continued journey to the fullness of salvation. I was going to sing the praises of the new translation, saying that it would help restore a pastoral consciousness of the Last Things. As it turned out, there wasn't much in the old prayers to accuse them of failing in these things.

So I guess one has to say that the widespread error of presumption with regard to the state of the departed after bodily death is not the fault of the liturgy, or at least of the liturgy as the Church presents it...

A Hodge-Podge of Discontinued Items

Hambone called yesterday to tell me he was about to go on John Corby's 610AM radio show. The subject was "car stories" and he proffered one on the time he ran over a brick which put a hole in his floorboard, right under his feet, and how subsequently, dressed for church and in a hurry, ran over a puddle with sprayed 2-3 gallons of water on him. Only faux paus in the telling was that he was asked if he still went to church and said, contradictorily, "I went home, because I had to play guitar at church." Turns out "home" was actually "on"; he'd lapsed into his southern accent. Tries to get fancy and ends up ponc'ing himself.

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Wasted too much time the other day watching the Republican debate (their voices cascaded over my brain like rushing water, allowing me not to have to think for awhile), thus getting up later than normal which caused me to miss the Byzantine liturgy that I often irrationally crave. Christ is Christ and He is present under both liturgies. But it was nice to have these last Christmas songs even if they felt akin to Christmas in July: The First Nowell, as they spelled it, "What Child is This?" and "We Three Kings". (The Byzantine service eschews Western carols.)

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Megabus rolls by, with enticing destinations emblazoned on its side: "Cleveland", "Ann Arbor", etc... I wonder how far I have to go to encounter foreignness. One city over? One state over? One region of the country over? One country over? One hemisphere over? One world over? I'll settle for Indianapolis Art Museum. Soon.

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What a pleasing game Sunday afternoon: Tim Tebow and the Denver Broncos defeating Big Ben and the Steelers. It was storybook as everyone knows by now: 80-yard td on first play in O/T. With Tebow, besides his Christian faith, he seems an underdog. Plus the string of last second "Tebow time" victories really get your attention. But now the seemingly insurmountable hurdle of mighty Tom Brady and the New England Patriots looms. It's hard to see a scenario where the Broncs don't get their asses kicked, the Peter principle in action. But of course I'll watch the game. As someone at worked mentioned, even when Tebow's a flop, it's entertaining. The NFL's got to love it.

Evolution of Nigerian Scams

I'm always interested in the latest advances of scamology, and it seems some are getting shorter, more to the point, and even show a taste for irony ("Born is dead"):

Attn: we are sorry to inform you of Mr. Allen Born's death this late. Although you might have not know that your name is written on Mr. Allen Born’s WILL; the reason for this late notification, as Allen Born’s dead, a lot of fake claims have been showing up. For more details as regards to this issue respond. Thanks, Barr Peter Morris.

Still, capitalizing "will" is a dead giveaway.

The Humility of God

"Why lies he in such mean estate / where ox and ass are feeding?"

The above, sung at church Sunday, reminded me of Scott Hahn's offering in "The Letter and the Spirit" arguing that the humility of Scripture ought be recognized more, that just as Christ was rejected, looked down upon and a stumbling block, so too will Scripture, dressed as it is in humble language (the Greek often not up to par) and with difficulties abounding.

Here are excerpts from volume 6 of Scott Hahn's The Letter and the Spirit:

I should first summarize what constitutes “the humble style of biblical language.” By this I mean those less-than-appealing features of the Word that represent stumbling blocks to a belief in the Bible’s divine perfection. For instance, one thinks of Scripture’s frequent use of anthropomorphisms and anthropopathisms to speak of God, who is otherwise said to be “spirit.” Many have scorned these as the crude conceptions of an uncultivated people. One could also point to Scripture’s unpolished diction and grammatical solecisms, features that make the Word off-putting to educated minds with more refined literary tastes. So too, its penchant for hyperbole and poetic license and approximation fails to captivate those who think that the Bible should have nothing to do with colloquial parlance and speak only with scientific exactitude. Still more scandal is afforded by the numerous alleged discrepancies that make the Bible appear inconsistent with itself, with the documents of ancient history, and with the findings of modern archeology. The collective impression of these “blemishes” causes proud minds to recoil and refuse consent. It is a reminder that unbelief will always remain an option and even the default position of many who find no way to account for Scripture’s apparent lack of sophistication.

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Recognition of Scripture’s humility invariably raises the question of its purpose. Why should God express himself and his will101 in the humble letter of the Bible? My own conviction is that it invites reason to embrace the knowledge of faith, and that it confronts pride with a summons to intellectual humility. The humility of the Word first of all represents a challenge to the supremacy of reason in the apprehension of reality. Reason, we are prone to forget, has inherent limitations with which one must come to terms. Not only is the intellectual faculty incapable of demonstrating the mysteries of faith disclosed through revelation, but it is also incapable of discovering the plans and purposes of God in history. This is a serious handicap when it comes to interpreting the Bible. It is not that we should retreat into fideism in our study of Scripture, but that we should avoid the irrationality of pure rationalism. One can say that reason functions properly when it accepts its limitations and acknowledges that there are questions it cannot answer.

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I believe that the humble expression of the Word invites us to be healed of intellectual arrogance. This is obviously related to the foregoing comments about reason and its limits. But the fact is that even when faith and reason are working in tandem, the latter is tempted to impose unreasonable restrictions on the former. In the realm of biblical studies, this takes the form of methodological skepticism, otherwise known as “a hermeneutic of suspicion.” Not only does this approach mean that the Bible’s sincerity and truthfulness must be proven before it can be accepted, but that the interpreter stands in a position of judgment over the Word, measuring its claims according to his or her own standards. This is to turn things upside down. The folly of divine condescension urges that we lay aside our hypercriticism and our educated conceit in approaching the biblical Word.

I thought though that it's precisely this humility of "Christ incarnate and Christ inspired", that is of Word and word, that makes His indwelling in me possible, in "mean estate". So the next time I struggle with a seeming contradiction in the Bible I ought simply remember to approach it as indicative of my own hope in salvation.

This & That

Oh what celestial event is occurring in the Ohio sky! It's a bird, it's a plane, no -- it's the sun! To what do we owe the privilege of this surprisingly strong sun coupled with fifty+ degree temps? Oh. Yeah. Likely global warming. Which means I can't *really* enjoy it, seeing how it's a bug, not a feature (that's assuming humans are contributing to it, concerning which I have no idea). But that's to indulge in the tyranny of the anecdotal; one warm temp does not global warming make. And every so often the stars align to produce freakishly positive weather under the unlikeliest of circumstances, mainly a 50 degree sunny low wind Saturday afternoon in January. As one FB'r put it, "is this Indian winter?" The biggest surprise is that it would coincide with a day off work, given the 2/7ths chance. So this is how southern Tennesseans live? Is this their "winter"? Took advantage of it by jogging a couple miles, walking a couple miles, and then sleep-reading on the back patio under that startling sun.

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There's ever the thrill of finding out what lands next on my Google Reader, and today's gem was a bit by Friar Minor about the epiphany:

"Maybe I notice this every year and for­get, or maybe I never caught it before, but it's inter­est­ing that Leo the Great, in the Office of Read­ings today, rec­om­mends for our imi­ta­tion not the magi but the star. 'The obe­di­ence of the star calls us to imi­tate its hum­ble ser­vice: to be ser­vants, as best we can, of the grace that invites all men to find Christ.'"

I rather liked that because it soothes the old ache of seeing creation as cold and impersonal, as an evolution-inspired thing. Seeing the created world as God-made lets us not have to wait for supernatural events in order to praise the Lord. The beauty of the sun and trees - those things I can actually SEE - shows me that there is something beyond me, a greatness. It's the rare time that my senses actually work for me instead of against me.

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Am re-reading "Love in the Ruins" by Walker Percy, which included this rather direct dialogue: "You know what's wrong with you? You don't love God, you love p-ssy!" Yes, pretty darn direct. The world in a nutshell: worshiping the wrong thing.

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So finished up the Judy Collins saga. She followed a Heather King arc, though without the Christianity: drank for 20 years, miserable, blackouts, depressed, found rehab, it "took" and she's been sober with respect to both drink and romance, the latter which had been a revolving bed affair. One does get a sense of just how powerful knowledge can be, since she was never told - and had no idea - that it wasn't that she drank because she was depressed, but she was depressed because she drank. After more than a decade of "therapists" who recommended free love in order to help solve the underlying issues that they said provoked her drinking, it was revolutionary to consider the reverse. Turns out some people are just of an addictive bent and thus get bent. Her life did seem to change on a dime with sobriety, beginning with her love life: she met her husband shortly thereafter and they've been together since '78.

Why's My Bookbag (or e-reader equivalent) so Heavy?

From the novel "Open City" by Teju Cole, which suffers from political correctness and some typically modern, moral obtuseness yet has some vivid images:

sat on one of the hard benches near the listening stations, and sank into reverie, and followed Mahler through drunkenness, longing, bombast, youth (with its fading), and beauty (with its fading). Then came the final movement, “Der Abschied,” the Farewell, and Mahler, where he would ordinarily indicate the tempo, had marked it schwer, difficult.


Most of the group, on the day I went, were women, many with that beatific, slightly unfocused expression one finds in do-gooders.


I have always had a problem with the shoeshine business, and even on the rare occasions when I wished to have my scuffed shoes cleaned, some egalitarian spirit kept me from doing so; it felt ridiculous to mount the elevated chairs in the shops and have someone kneel before me. It wasn’t, as I often said to myself, the kind of relationship I wanted to have with another person.


It’s an expectation that works sometimes, I said, but only if your enemy is not a psychopath. You need an enemy with a capacity for shame. I wonder sometimes how far Gandhi would have gotten if the British had been more brutal. If they had been willing to kill masses of protesters. Dignified refusal can only take you so far. Ask the Congolese.


the way to be someone, the way to catch the attention of the young and recruit them to one’s cause, was to be enraged. It seemed as if the only way this lure of violence could be avoided was by having no causes, by being magnificently isolated from all loyalties. But was that not an ethical lapse graver than rage itself?


It would do little good to describe for him the subtle shades of meaning evoked in an American ear by saying “Jews” instead of “Jewish people.”


I became aware of just how fleeting the sense of happiness was, and how flimsy its basis: a warm restaurant after having come in from the rain, the smell of food and wine, interesting conversation, daylight falling weakly on the polished cherrywood of the tables. It took so little to move the mood from one level to another, as one might push pieces on a chessboard.


I made an effort to develop a mind of winter. Late last year, I actually said to myself audibly, as I do when I swear these oaths, that I would have to embrace winter as part of the natural cycle of seasons. Ever since I left Nigeria, I’d had a bad attitude about cold weather, and I wanted to put an end to that.


I was out earlier today to see the Chamber Music Society at Lincoln Center. They performed one of the Bach cantatas, the one about coffee....Coffee, coffee, the young woman sang, I simply must have coffee. Three times a day, or I will shrivel up!


his prostatectomy, he had told me, had effectively killed off any sexual urges that had survived the other ravages of old age. But the strange thing he found, he had said at the time, was that this freed him to have more tender and uncomplicated relationships with people.


incessant bereavement [is] one of the hidden costs of a long life.

And a couple from Chesterton essays "In Defense of Sanity":

They are at the same time soft and strong. The smoothness of them has the same meaning as the smoothness of great carthorses, or the smoothness of the beech-tree; it declares in the teeth of our timid and cruel theories that the mighty are merciful.


Mercy does not mean not being cruel or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not seen. Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.

Lamentations & Exaggerations

Argh!! What fresh hell is this? It's an all day meeting off-site called "Champion training" that promises to test my sanity. Oh how I've gotten used to the zen of working at my desk. Our new leader, Holly, is peeing on her tree, hell-bent on leaving her mark. She's a big believer and enthusiast of business fads, extrovert that she is.

But I see in my negative reaction to this change the seeds of what is wrong with society in general. Read an interesting piece in Wall Street Journal on the long, slow slide of Kodak, which is on the verge of bankruptcy. You wonder how such a well-respected, profitable company couldn't see the future of digital and adjust accordingly. It's fascinating and sad to see a country, company or individual fail to adapt to changing conditions, and I find it especially compelling given my own difficulty with change.

With our country, I find it hard to believe that we are in this situation debt-wise. It seems like the solution is so simple: spend less than you take in. There's a denial that can set in, denial that our leaders won't NOT do something about it in time. It seems we're drifting towards an abyss that everyone can see, and it's not the abysses you can see that "should" determine fate. It's the unknowns that should be problematic. So just as Kodak, you'd think, would be able to reinvent itself in plenty of time before its current apocalypse, you'd think the U.S. should. Part of the reason Kodak couldn't was said to be the very expensive pension cost of retirees, which sounds suspiciously similar to the problem with America today.

Meh...

How out of step I feel! Except for Jeff Miller, Jennifer Fulwiler & the Anchoress, this list of top 20 Catholic bloggers seems unremarkable. Missing bloggers include Betty Duffy, Heather King, Darwin Catholic, Steve Gershom, Tom of Disputations, Tim at Catholic Bibles to name just a few. Fr. Z's popularity is ever a source of puzzlement to me, seeming just the conservative version of say, Fr. L. Neither floats my boat.

I Suspected As Much...

I wondered aloud recently whether we (i.e. Americans) weren't all the 1%, especially by historical standards. But even by current standards many of us are:

It only takes $34,000 a year, after taxes, to be among the richest 1% in the world. That's for each person living under the same roof, including children. (So a family of four, for example, needs to make $136,000.)

Two Links

Why Simcha Fisher is voting for Romney. I applaud her blogesty (blog + honesty). I'll probably vote for Romney as well; I like RuPaul's anti-war stance but he takes it a bridge too far, sounding at times Michael Moore-ish. (Oh balance, where are thy?) Santorum, by contrast, seems too hawkish and gives little indication that he's learned the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan, or the hellish costs. Huntsman has yet to catch fire for whatever reason, perhaps in part because the MSM seems oddly well-disposed to him (Huntsman is more conservative than most think, and I like his anti-torture stance). Gingrich has trouble governing himself which wouldn't bode well for the key leadership position in the federal government. (Plus, as a Midwesterner, I'm congenitally disposed to dislike egotism in others.)

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And a beautiful offering from Fred of Late Papers, who is more concerned with the why of weight loss than the how:

According to Myfitnesspal.com (alias freder1ck), I've logged in 184 days in a row, and have lost 57.5 pounds. I was recently asked how I did this. My first answer (why) is that I've been lucky— I've come up against something that has reordered my desire, made me more reasonable, and strengthened me. My second answer (how) is various: I eat less and exercise more (Catbert); have studied a bit on fitness and overeating (The Culprit and the Cure, Overcoming Binge Eating); use online tools (myfitnesspal, Runtastic app).

People are typically more interested in the how than in the why. However, there's not much of a secret about the how— as Catbert's advice suggests.

What's more interesting to me is the why. To begin with, I noticed that there are many products out there to control appetite, but I recognized that I ate contrary to appetite. I ate when I wasn't hungry and when I was full, and my eating was increasingly disproportionate to my hunger, as if attempting to fill infinite desire with finite matter, or to stop up an infinite desire with finite materials. If the reason for eating is prolonging life, overeating has the opposite impact— an action that betrays an unreasonable attittude.

In 2002, I heard a beautiful song that promised "liberty that Abraham Lincoln could not have given me." This was at the presentation of Luigi Giussani's book The Religious Sense in Atchison, Kansas. In 2007, I attended Spiritual Exercises of Communion and Liberation in Winona, Minnesota, on the theme of "Christ in His Beauty Draws Me to Him." Two points in this weekend fascinated me: 1. instinct is good and 2. instinct is ordered toward totality. As soon as I heard this, I perceived that it would be possible to live in freedom. At the same time, I realized that I would not be content to only lose weight or only to be free of 'the dictatorship of desires.' Only totality, only infinite beauty would be enough.

Why did it take years for me to discover a new relationship with food and exercise? Freedom is a long road, but in the last 6 months things have come together for me. If you're following infinite beauty, you're content to wait a bit for this or that finite beauty. At any rate, Camus wrote that “It is not by means of scruples that man will become great; greatness comes through the grace of God, like a beautiful day."

Along the way, I'm discovering other beauties— the beauty of walking in all kinds of weather, the beauty of raking and bagging leaves: the beauty of sunset and cold while raking leaves, the beauty of combing over the lawn and counting every leaf, the beauty of taking care of my lawn and discovering a relationship with these trees we have.

From Men's Health magazine...

RULE No. 11: Respect the Sacramental Wine
It's no accident that alcohol is front and center in lots of religious rites. In the Roman Catholic Eucharist, wine symbolizes the transit from brutal violence to redemptive hope. Our taste for faith meets the same need as our taste for fume blanc—our longing for linkage. The word "religion" is derived from the Latin religare, meaning "to tie or fasten." (Care to tie one on?) And just as we sing those hymns in search of common ground, we share a drink to find a way across the space between us.

If we had any interest in exalting drinking, we'd describe it as a hope that a barely-there buzz might silence the judgments in our heads and help us open our hearts to the rest of God's children. "You shall not withhold yourself," theologian Martin Buber suggested, is the secret to a full life. A man could do worse for a motto; a drink just might help him live up to it.