Seems a Worthwhile Enterprise....

Papal Translation Project

Learn Something New Every Day

Today I am hyp-mo-tized by learning of digit ratio, and all the physical and psychological effects attributed to it.

Classical Bugs

Everything I learned about classical music I learned from watching Bugs Bunny. Ok that's false, but still I wonder if my earliest exposures to great music came via that cartoon. It seems I recall Rossini's Barber of Seville as background music for some wacky caper. I must hie me to the 'Net and see what a google search reveals for “classical music” + “bugs bunny”…..

Paydirt!: “I grew up watching Bugs Bunny, Tom and Jerry, and Popeye cartoons, because they were regularly shown on the independent stations here in St. Louis…Those cartoons helped develop my love of classical music. Rossini’s overtures were popular with cartoonists, as were Liszt’s Hungarian rhapsodies and Brahms’ Hungarian dances. In cartoon-land, Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata became synonymous with quiet, moonlit scenes…”

Paydirt II: “Comedian Jerry Seinfeld once observed that his entire understanding of high culture / classical music was derived from Bugs Bunny cartoons.”

Proof again that it seems pretty impossible to come up with an independent thought. Anyway, I wonder if today's kids get any of this wonderful taste of Western culture?

God's Shroud?

I've long thought the Shroud of Turin was legit (won over by evidence of plant pollens from Palestine in it), and recent scientific tests now date it to the time of the 1st century A.D. That despite a carbon dating done about 30 years ago that suggested the shroud originated during the Middle Ages. Which I find interesting in numerous ways. One is that if God left some sort of extraordinary proof in the shroud, enough to have convinced Malcolm Muggeridge (or was it Russell Kirk?) of the veracity of Christianity, then it's kind of funny He didn't protect it from the fire that is said to have resulted in the original Middle Ages dating. Certainly it seems very much an extraneous "proof" since for most of the centuries of Christian belief it has not been publicly available or known.

And it's funny how science tends to get things wrong. (If I went by the latest scientific research I'd be afraid to eat anything for fear of cancer, heart disease or irritable bowel syndrome.) So I guess what these events tell us is: take science with a grain of salt and put not your faith even in the Shroud of Turin. Sometimes I think the existence of the Shroud is God forgetting to tidy up some detail that would too nakedly reveal his existence and thus obviate the need for faith, but that's to think of God as capable of error which is hilariously false!

An Unabridged History of My Card Collecting

For reasons unclear it seems important to catalog and categorize my year-by-year youthful intoxication with baseball cards. Simply by googling what the Topps card of a particular year looks like, I can tell, with some degree of certainty, my level of engagement with the hobby of kings.

It's hard to tell how much the design of the cards themselves influenced my degree of enthusiasm: Did I buy fewer cards in 1974 compared to 1973 because the design was weaker? Or was something else going on in my life to take precedence, as shocking as that concept might be.

So, without further ado:

1971: Magic time. I'd just turned eight the summer of '71 when I bought my first packs of the black-bordered cards. Whether the cards were handsomely designed seems a gauche point since I'd fallen in love at first sight and feel. I was instantly transported by the rows of orderly statistics displayed on the card backs, and it nearly a divine revelation to learn how the earned run average was calculated even though I don't think I was capable of doing the math myself. At least I knew, from adult authorities, that higher is not better. It felt a bit counterintuitive at the time. During this early age of baseball card collecting it was all purity, all the time. We had absolutely no concept of monetary value, no idea the cards could be treated as stock instruments.

1972: Arguably THE year of baseball card collecting for me. Nine years old, in the sweet spot, that golden age. The TOPPS design that year was gilt-golden and photographs otherworldly, the cards glittering. The heroes depicted appeared as gods on gleaming fields. Perhaps it's my imagination, but I wonder if even TOPPS itself was blessedly unselfconscious back then, designing cards not as marketable commodities yet but still making packs with the dust of pink gum affixed for…yes… nine year olds. The Frank Robinson and Pete Rose cards still have the ring of myth and truth about them.

1973: Here the TOPPS design suffers a bit or perhaps my interest waned fractionally. Ten years old now, these I collected assiduously and have warm feelings towards but…but the cards don't feel as incandescent as the '71 or '72 sets. There's that tissue-thin difference (that seemingly makes all the difference) between the mystical magical 1972 set and the functional, avuncular 1973 set. The Willie Mays and Matty Alou cards stand out as far as they go, and the backs of the cards are extremely familiar - suggesting I spent a lot of fondling time with them. 

1974: This year's set is filled with mystery. I don't have many of these cards and I'm not sure why. Was it because the Reds had an “off-season” in finishing second to the Dodgers and card-collecting was affected? Was this when I sold most of my cards for $5 to an unscrupulous card dealer and never managed to subsequently restore their numbers?  I The Google images look familiar and warmly received - I recall the “magic” that getting “Washington Nat'l League” error cards. TOPPS had mistakenly assumed the San Diego Padres were moving to the nation's capital and printed a fraction of their cards under that title. These cards never turned out to be worth all that much surprisingly. But at the time they seemed pretty special and highly active “trading bait”. It was probably around this time, at the tender age of 11, that cards took on the notion of having some external value. The notion of rookie cards being worth more than non-rookie cards probably took place in '74 or, for sure by '75 when Boston's Rice and Lynn would look like Mantle and Maris. I remember the Hank Aaron Home Run King card with great affection.

1975: Feel modest affinity for this distinctive and colorful set. Certainly there's no denying I was heavily into cards in this, my 12th summer, even if the cards themselves hold not the magic of '71 or '72. By now I was collecting older cardboard specimens at card shows with paper-route money and trading Mantles and Aaron's garnered from my friend's uncle's collection. 1971 and 1972 had no competing cards – that period of my card-collecting was completely ahistorical. I had only the present moment. But by '75 I was becoming more discerning, more critical. Did I like the gaudy cards at the time? Was I collecting out of a sense of nostalgia, duty or value appreciation?

1976: These cards were certainly collected assiduously but perhaps not as lovingly attended to and cared for. This is the first design of cards that I can't easily recall and I'm not sure that's a reflection of the more prosaic card design or simply that my own interest at begun to wane, inversely with my 13-year old hormones.

1977: This set, while familiar, has some unfamiliar cards popping up on the google image search. At 14 definitely interest in cards was flagging - certainly these cards seem to me “watered down”, not providing much punch at all. Definitely a big fall-off from 1975.

1978: While I have plenty of these cards, it's obvious I bought them in a later collecting interest resurgence because the backs of the cards are way unfamiliar. Almost no bonding with this set. At 15 years old, the summer after my freshman year at high school, it appears collecting baseball cards have reached a nadir.

1979: This “sweet sixteen” set evokes absolutely no emotion. If I collected it at the time and not during the '80s, then it was certainly out of a sense of loyalty to the hobby.

1980: This set is more familiar than '77-'79 and suggests a mild resurgence of the collecting bug at 17 years old, in high school and meeting an English teacher who was a card-ophile (and who looked like a dead ringer of an obscure pitcher for the '72 Rangers).

1981: The summer between high school and college is the first set that looks very unfamiliar. Obviously no collecting of this was done. I think I bussed tables at the Brown Derby restaurant. If not I was definitely not spending time sorting through cards and trying to complete sets. Even the star cards look strange. But then life happens.

1982 - 1984: These sets not collected at all. Perhaps part of it was the Reds were pretty bad, losing over a hundred games in '82. Or because I was feeling too adult to collect cards, seeing how I was a collegian.

1985 - College done. A career begun. A year of interest in that the Reds were much better, finishing in second place and Pete Rose breaking Ty Cobb's hit record. A young rookie named Eric Davis was making baseball - and thus baseball cards - more interesting. I collected a few this year (or perhaps retroactively) such that some of the cards, like the Davis, look slightly iconic.

1986 - If I collected any of these it was not with enthusiasm. Seem to have become completely preoccupied. At 23, cards took a nose dive.

1987 - The full-blown renaissance of card-collecting. Here at the age of 24 I was 'coming home' to the hobby. I have a billion of '87 cards and I think at least in part because now I was thinking it fully as a “stock-like investment”.
Complete sets, mint condition, all that jazz. Ironically, the '87 set is almost worthless, in part due to everyone and their brother was saving them under the same illusion that they'd be worth something some day. Supply and demand. Lots of supply in the '87s.

1988-1990 - Collected but rarely looked at these. They were to be salted away like treasures under the sea.

1991 - Here the last scents of recognition linger. Here would be the last set that even looks familiar. At age 28, the card collecting hobby seems to have played out. Fo 21 years, there would be no new buys.

Quote

The following, from Pope Benedict's second volume on Jesus, reminds me of how he himself (Benedict) might've put an end to the custom of being pope unto death:

God acts like a good schoolteacher or a doctor. He slowly puts an end to certain customs, allows others to continue, and thus leads man forward. “A departure from time-honored, customary ways is, after all, not easy..."

From Cardinal Ratzinger's Co-Workers of the Truth...

The simple faith of simple souls merits the respect, the reverence of the preacher, who has noright simply to pit his intellectual superiority against a faith which has remained simple and which, by its simple and intuitive comprehension of the Faith as a whole, can, in some cases, understand the essence of that Faith more profoundly than is possible for a reflective faith that is fragmented by division into systems and theories. In my view, what is fundamental here is the insight that the transition from the Old to the New Testament actually took place in the faith of simple souls: it was the anawim (“the poor”) who associated themselves neither with the liberalism of the Sadducees nor with the literal orthodoxy of the Pharisees. Because of their simple intuitive comprehension of the Faith, their lives were based on an absolute confidence in its promise and precepts and so became the locale in which the Old Testament could be transformed into the New Testament: Zechariah, Elizabeth, Mary, Joseph, Jesus himself. The “faith of the poor” continues to be the most precious treasure of the Church, about which Jesus spoke these weighty words: “If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me [that is, destroys his faith by your intellectualism], it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea” (Mk 9:42). This text is not (as one might judge from the context in Matthew) about children whose innocence one should not destroy; nor is sexual scandal the immediate theme of these words. The “little ones who believe” are, rather, the simple individuals who believe simply and as simple persons. It is about the faith of these little people, the ordinary people, the poor, that Jesus is speaking.

Beer Facts

Popes and Crosses

Came across the hymn that follows in the Liturgy of the Hours and I thought about how the physical cross was once a tree instead of dead wood, and how that tree was also, in a sense, “resurrected” by Christ in that what was once an anonymous plant became the most famous and sought after wood in all the world. It reminded me again of Christ's saying that “unless a grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains a grain of wheat.”

There has been speculation over what sort of tree it was, some saying a species of pine common in the Holy Land at the time known as “Aleppo Pine”.

Faithful Cross, above all other,
One and only noble Tree,
None in foliage, none in blossom,
None in fruit thy peer may be;
Sweet the wood and sweet the iron,
And the load, most sweet is he.

From the Catechism, I found it interesting that creation speaks not just to the closeness of God but his nearness:

Light and darkness, wind and fire, water and earth, the tree and its fruit speak of God and symbolize both his greatness and his nearness.

Nice! I'd sort of intuitively glommed on to that, so it's nice to see the confirmation.

*

To paraphrase David Letterman's old saying about Madonna and apply it to this pope, “He loves to shock us!” Indeed, he's a live-wire! Eschewing the papal apartments? He's got guts just to be able to tell his handlers no so easily. Be like the President telling the Secret Service he ain't gonna live in the White House. He's his own man in spades! Refreshing, but then I think Benedict was perfectly his own man as was certainly John Paul II. Just in different ways. Benedict got bold on the intellectual front by trying to dialogue with Muslims in the Regensburg speech. And John Paul II of course was one of a kind. I think Pope Francis reminds me so much of John Paul I except that Francis seems to have a lot more confidence. John Paul the First just felt totally overwhelmed by the job while this pope acts with perfect insouciance. You get the feeling he doesn't overthink things: it cracks me up the Russian Orthodox gift him with a beautiful icon and he re-gifts it three days later. Somehow I don't think gold-laden icons much appeal to this thrifty and down-to-earth man. And with what frugalness does he live! He used to get the paper delivered and it came wrapped in a rubber band. He'd save the rubber bands and each month deliver thirty of them back to the kiosk!

Pope Francis has more freedom than John Paul II might've felt since JP II was the first non-Italian in a billion years and there was no reason to be shake things up unnecessarily and make the Italians nervous. But now everyone's used to the non-Italian popes so the sacred cows have been gored, or are being gored. Say what you want about Francis but he's no stickler for tradition and he certainly seems to understand the parlous state the church is in right now. It ain't business as usual. No time to fiddle while Rome burns. No strolls through the lovely Vatican wings admiring the beautiful art for this papa! It seems a situation where the man is perfectly matched to the moment.

Though he is ruining it for future popes as Lino Rulli pointed out.  How's the next one ever going to be able to say “oh, I think I'll go for 3000-sq foot luxury accommodations.” Certainly the low church Protestants love him.

I can't wait to read a biography of him though I'm averse to reading one too soon. I'd rather read wait and read a quality biography rather than just getting the first rushed one that comes out. And of course the big story is the one that hasn't happened yet, i.e. what will be of his pontificate.

It's kind of inspiring looking at the official portrait of Pope Francis since he's not a particularly handsome or striking-looking man. It sort of plays against the worldly stereotype that our leaders have to be young and vigorous and debonair. Francis is certainly the anti-Obama in more ways than one. 

I felt this passage from a recent article really drives home the impact grandparents can have:

In the book-interview “El Jesuita”, Cardinal Bergoglio had said he kept a folded text written by his grandmother in side the breviary, the two volume prayer book he always carries with him even when he travels. The text is a short testament left to her grandchildren, which reads: “May my grandchildren, to whom I have given my whole heart, have a long and happy life but if pain, sickness or loss of a loved one should fill them with sadness, may they remember that one breath taken at the Tabernacle, where the greatest and august martyr is present and one glance at Mary at the foot of the cross, will act like a balm that is able to heal the deepest and most painful wounds.”

What a beautiful saying of his grandmother. She has the words of a pope! I could do worse than copy those lines somewhere where I can see them often.

*

Oh how I'd like to have been a fly on the wall listening to when Pope met Pope! 45 minute conversation and it can't have all been small talk. Two holy devout men sharing an office that less than three hundred souls have shared in the history of mankind. Despite all the amazing access we have via the Internet and social media to famous people's thoughts and words, there are some things we still do not have access to. Which is as it should be, of course, but it doesn't stop me from being insatiably curious.

Sundry & Various

Oh who does not love a bookish curmudgeon? There's Joe Queenan's One for the Books but I found another in the dusty archives of Britain's Literary Review, a Henry Hitchens:

“Once upon a time you became a librarian because you fancied a quiet life: 'Catalogue some books, deal with the occasional pedant, write The Whitsum Weddings.' Not anymore.”

He dislikes the way modern libraries have become loud and he sounds unashamedly Mr. Wilson-ish reacting to the modern Dennis the Menace crowd.

Then I read a bit of the BBC history of the 13th century king, Edward I. A bit on the dry side alas. I like the idea of reading these Brit magazines more than the actuality. Although I was interested to learn from the Literary Review that Anthony Trollope's mother wrote a semi-scathing expose of America in Domestic Manners of Americans (spoiler: the manners deemed not good) which I proceeded to download for free since it was written around 1830. The first chapter caught my attention and my heart given her wonder at the ocean's “indescribable charm”:

Perhaps some may think that the first glance of ocean and of sky shew all they have to offer…but to me, their variety appeared endless, and their beauty unfailing…I may recall with difficulty the blue outline of the Alleghany mountains, never, while I remember any thing, can I forget the first and last hour of light on the Atlantic.

Anyway apparently the book caused quite a row between Britain and America, one Anthony Trollope aimed to mend by writing his own friendlier book on the land of the (somewhat) free and the brave.

*

Miss and pine
that timber-pined craft,
boards of amusement
professionals all:
musicians and sailors
comedians and chefs
waiters, room cleaners:
oh the live long dram!

The sweet buzz of sea
on mornings unmourned,
glimpses on the balcony
of tireless scenes --
I think I'm in lush with that boat
winds from Castro's land
sail shrug'd of carry or woe
undulations of rhythm
till “It's medicine time!”
the heal of sun and warmth
trivially basic ingredients.


*


It's interesting and a privilege to see human life at its earliest. I'd more or less had the mistaken notion that we all began as blank slates, as more or less interchangeable. A baby is a baby is a baby, even allowing for physical and psychological differences due to sex.

But seeing the first year or two of both S. and W. I'm intrigued by how different their interests and preferences are almost immediately out of the womb. And it certainly seems like a whole different environment for the second born as compared to the first. At least my own attitude is telling in that I spend 90% of my time and attention on S; when S was W's age I spent 100% of my time and attention on S. So W is being “gypped” in that a 3-year old is just much more fun to play with than a 1-year old. That can work the other way too of course - parents have to give more attention to their newborn just because the feedings are so much more frequent and because the baby won't play on his own. Plus W is fascinated by S and so has a richer and more engaging environment than S had.

As small a thing as the opening and closing of things - drawers or the arm rest of the recliner - seemed much more of interest to one year old S than one year old W.

Dogs too are quite different, witness our Buddy and Obi. I don't know why I should be surprised at any of this. We are all as individual as snowflakes. If God can make snowflakes different, how much more animals and humans?


*

Oh what joy the Kindle prompts in me! Even though intellectually I realize it's the McDonaldization of reading. McDonald's prides itself on the smooth experience: no matter where you go you'll get the same tasting hamburgers and fries, standardized and homogenized. Similarly the Kindle removes all those barriers to entry such as different font types, font sizes, margins, paper textures. Books on Kindle are so easily consumed using settings that you've chosen as your default. I read more if only because there are no lingering stopovers, no pressing of nose to inked page, no leisurely author bio re-readings, no distractions of font.

*

I miss the Nigerian scammers
who tell me their tales of woe.
I miss the Nigerian scammers
we'll not see their like till it snow.
They tell us their tales of banking woe
They tell us their tales of woe.
If not for Nigerian scammers,
I'd have no poetry to show.

*


Was thinking about the poor today because I came across a passage in Co-Workers of the Truth and because of an Atlantic magazine article that tries to understand why the rich are so ungenerous compared to poorer folks (1.3% of rich folks' income versus 3.4% for the poor, and with the rich it's rarely money given for those in distressed situations but instead to museums, universities, etc..).

The Atlantic makes the case that wealth is isolating, which creates an “empathy gap”. The rich don't know any poor people therefore they can't empathize.

A lack of money forces people together more in little ways and big. You have to go to family members for help in repairing things, or in moving, or building something instead of hiring it done. The poor borrow instead of buy.

Some young relatives have almost no money and the suspicion is that what brings them to family gatherings is the free meal. Or what brings them to the Christmas party is the promise of gifts. They are said to totally ignore the family except when they need something. But I wonder if that isn't better than the alternative, i.e. being rich enough to blow off the family completely. I think of this also in connection with spiritual poverty. In religious terms, I am the beggar. I am the one dirt poor coming to God and the saints, perhaps mostly in hope of gifts in the form of prayers, mercy… But at least it brings me to them.

I was reading was a line from National Review about how the diversity folks want not equality of opportunity but “equality of result”. And I thought about how that desire which has taken root in America is also reflected in religion where universalism is the de facto belief: that there will be an equality of eternal result. I long for universalism to be true and we do pray that all be saved, but I guess that's different from believing it to be true. Just as some think it fair and just that homosexuals be married, and some think that it's unfair that blacks are incarcerated at a higher rate than whites despite underlying behaviors, so too do we want Heaven to be independent of earthly behaviors.

*

Whoa. There are few things more utterly consuming than being on a genealogical super sleuth mission. Got totally obsessed with it.

I found out a very exciting piece of info: exactly where great-grandfather James fell in 1899. Must visit the scene of that crime. Two little girls were with him, surely his daughters who were like 8 and 6 at the time. Via the magic of Google Earth, I was able to find the exact spot (it would seem pretty much unchanged since the houses around that area are all of 1900-vintage). How neat a trick of time travel to be able to go to the exact spot your great-grandfather fell some 114 years ago? And to see a spot apparently little changed.

So my mom got me all excited about Joan supposedly finding the “missing link” in the James saga, the city of his birth. This would be an astonishing breakthrough because generally if you have the city you can find the parents and thus go back a generation or more. But color me dubious. I emailed Joan and she said she someone told her it was “Stafford” but I'm not seeing any census data for a James born in New Jersey under Stafford or Stratford or any variation I could think of. As much as I've researched James, I do find it hard to believe someone could've scooped me. He's Ahab's whale to me, my Moby-Dick. He shows that often sinners fascinate more than saints, that we remember Clark Gable more than Leslie Howard. And of course it helps that his life is infused with mystery: like Melchizedek we don't know where he was born or where he died. We don't know if he died tried to save someone in the 1913 flood or fled to parts west in search of greener pastures. I can't find his marriage license to save my life. He enters the scene as a 26 year old in 1891 with the birth of his first child and disappears suddenly in 1913 at 48. The only thing we know for certain is that he had children and that he passed his y chromosome even unto me. DNA is a crap-shoot, a hit or miss thing shrouded in mystery and garnered from multiplicative sources, but every paternal great-grandfather's Y chromosome is identical to every great-grandson's. It's the one sure thing passed from father to son in an unbroken line.

Oh, and another thing we can be sure is that he's dead now. To be 148 years old would make him famous and I'd surely have heard of him.

No matter how much of a good-for-nothing he may've been, the mere fact that he had found a wife and impregnated her eight times meant that his life bore fruit, literally and figuratively.  How can a person love their life and despise their forebear given that it's only through that ancestor that they have life? They do leave a legacy. And here I wrote earlier of being dismissive of those who care unduly about their legacy! Ha. 


*

I felt in a ravenously Twitter mood last night. The various social medias complement one another perfectly: tumblr for artistic right-brain'd beauty, twitter for links and madcap one-liners, and Facebook for family color. And the mood varies but Twitter is especially addictive lately because it offers a constant stream of Pope Francis-related items via my follows.

Woke up and watched a bit of Morning Joe which pretty consistently offers only irritation. Haven't watched in months since I tired (almost instantaneously) of inauguration news, followed by sequestration news. Politics feels so “over”, in the sense that Obama won and thus whatever slim hope we had for governing sanity seems past. Today's show featured blowhard Mike Barnicle piously defending gay marriage and pointing to how surely Justice Roberts will want to be on the “right side of history” by declaring gay marriage valid in a court case being heard today. “Twenty years from now it will tarnish his reputation since everyone will wonder what the fuss was about,” declared Barnicle. I love how the “right side of history” is automagically determined by a historical consensus. (Well, they do say that the victors write the history books. But God keeps the only ledger that matters.) As has been said said elsewhere, Jesus was killed by consensus and Hitler was democratically elected. But Barnicle does have a point inasmuch as the great temptation for public figures is to attend to their “legacy”. For some reason it's crucially important to them to be thought well of after they're dead and so Barnicle is definitely playing the right cards.


*

Finished the compulsively readable tell-all book on cruise. Seems as though in this “brave new world” where self-publishing sans editor is the rage then there's nothing to stop the sort of nakedly honest sex diary. He said that his wife said she was glad he had sex with all those girls before because without it “he would have always wondered what it would have been like, and that type of curiosity can destroy a marriage.”

I didn't overly appreciate, but am certainly not surprised, by how Americans are universally denigrated by the crews of cruise ships. Americans have the reputation of being “rude, stupid and overweight hamburger-chasers.” In fact, hamburgers were so linked with Americans that the crew refused to eat them.

Let's Play...Why's My Bookbag or E-Reader Equivalent So Heavy?

Excerpt from a Jack Gilbert poem, sans line breaks:

Often I took care of the baby while she did housework. Changing him and making him laugh. I would say Pittsburgh softly each time before throwing him up. Whisper Pittsburgh with my mouth against the tiny ear and throw him higher. Pittsburgh and happiness high up. The only way to leave even the smallest trace. So that all his life her son would feel gladness unaccountably when anyone spoke of the ruined city of steel in America. Each time almost remembering something maybe important that got lost.

Chabon's "Telegraph Avenue":

The record playing in the background of the dream apartment was a classic collaboration between Maceo Parker and Curtis Mayfield, the soundtrack from a well-known blaxploitation movie called Top Hat and Elbows. He listened to the beautiful music, fat beats, sunshine horns and shadow bass, and talked nonsense to his mom as she would always be. Thank goodness, thought his present-day self, I am having this wonderful dream.

*

Archy had walked out of the situation, which was a weak-ass way of choosing Plan B, for no good reason at all except some pathetic residual loyalty to the man who had done nothing but squirt some key proteins into his mother’s belly. And because, why not finally admit it, a man like Archy was never likely to go for a plan like Plan A. Come on. He was no better than Luther Stallings, and the theoretical loyalty to his father on display yesterday consisted of nothing more than that. Like so many kinds of masculine loyalty, it was really only a manifestation of cowardice.

*

...you could settle the kid right down by putting on the most Out shit you had on tap, the deepest kind of Sun Ra jazz-as-cosmic-background-radiation. Long as it was playing, little Julius would stop looking like he was about to be audited by the IRS and just sit there, watching the music like a cat watching ghosts.

*

It was a wild guess, a string of them, charms of rumor and gossip hung from a chain of audacity. Half-remembered talk in the kitchens of his earliest childhood, mingled with the acrid hiss of a hot comb and the chink of ice in glasses of Flavor Aid.

*

Along with the backyard coops of heirloom laying hens, the collectively owned pizzerias, the venerable Volvos that had rolled off the line at Torslanda before ABBA first went gold, the racks of Dynaco tube amplifiers, the BPA-free glass baby bottles, and the ramshackle wonderland known as the Adventure Playground, one minor component in the patchwork of levees erected by the citizens of Berkeley, California, in their ongoing battle to defend their polder against the capitalist flood tides of consumerist uniformity, was a telephone hanging on the wall of the Jaffe family’s kitchen, a model 554 with a rotary dial, smiley-face yellow, its handset connected to its plastic shell by a snaking twenty-five-foot helix of yellow cord, kinked by old and unsolvable knots.

Taylor Marshall's "The Eternal City":

Christ’s establishment of Rome as the perpetual Apostolic See is not intended as a legalistic mechanism to limit salvation throughout the earth. Moreover, it is certainly not meant to restrict grace. Rather, Rome was established as the perpetual Apostolic See so that full communion might be achieved among Christians.

*

The Christ that defeats Daniel’s Rome is not a soft and effeminate sage. Rather, He is the conquering King of Kings and Lord of Lords. The spiritual imperialism of Christ was fully appreciated by our Christian forefathers. We, however, have forgotten the ancient feats of strength demonstrated by the monastics of old. For example, the penance of the Desert Fathers would have brought a sense of wonder even to the Roman Stoic Cato. We have forgotten the triumphant Roman martyrs, such as Saint Lawrence who would have kindled awe in the bravest Roman pagan warriors, such as Mucius Scaevolus. As the baptized have forgotten the noble army of martyrs that once fertilized the Eternal City with faith, so also have they lost esteem for Rome’s spiritual dignity.

Francismania

So Brendan had an interesting post about the Pope Francis phenomena.  He ascribes the general interest to mankind's fascination with  monarchy and to Catholics in particular the excitement of getting to know somebody new.  I agree, though I feel a tiny bit disloyal for feeling so: do we tend to "use up" our leaders, to "consume" their ideas, thoughts, and way of putting things only to want to hear some fresh voice a few years later, as we might similarly tire of those who seem overly familiar to us?

So honestly, would I have paid any attention to Cardinal Bergoglio had he not become pope? The answer is likely no.  It's the office - even the clothing? - that makes the man.* Or maybe it's the charisma of the Holy Spirit. It's as if when Bergoglio became pope that he became infused with something special and incredibly enticing.  I like to think the Holy Spirit was communicating to us through the cardinals in the election of Pope Francis. Perhaps I'm being naive or pious and overly devotional given the bad popes we've had in the mediaeval past.   Being in a church with a history tends to remove rose-colored illusions.  But God can and does use humans to fulfill his will - nothing illusory about that.

Anyway I find the Francismania intriguing.  One of the things being bandied about is that Francis is "humbler" than Benedict because of his clothing and manner and such. But that's to judge by mere appearances; you can kiss feet and be proud - only God knows the heart. I tend to think it'd be as wrong for Pope Benedict to have done public acts like kissing the feet of AIDS patients as it would be for Pope Francis to not do the same. In other words, where in Benedict an action might take on the flavor of a publicity stunt, in Francis it may be the natural outgrowth of his personal spiritual path.  Grace perfects nature, and there's a sense in which the nature of Benedict and Francis are simply different. Which is a-ok.

I've perhaps become over-sensitized to perceived slights against Benedict due to a friend dissing him in an email to me and by Cardinal Mahoney's impressively immature tweets.

* - even Cardinal Dolan said something not totally dissimilar, in that he felt like there was palpable difference between Cardinal Bergoglio being one of the cardinals in the conclave compared to when he became pope.

Plato & the Cross

This is pretty interesting that hundreds of year before Christ it was predicted by Plato that there would be a crucified just man:

The Cross is revelation.  It reveals who God is and who man is. There is a curious presentiment of this situation in Greek philosophy: Plato’s image of the crucified “just man”. In the Republic the great philosopher asks what is likely to be the position of a completely just man in this world. He comes to the conclusion that a man’s righteousness is only complete and guaranteed when he takes on the appearance of unrighteousness, for only then is it clear that he does not follow the opinion of men but pursues justice only for its own sake. So according to Plato the truly just man must be misunderstood and persecuted in this world; indeed, Plato goes so far as to write: “They will say that our just man will be scourged, racked, fettered, will have his eyes burnt out, and at last, after all manner of suffering, will be crucified.…” This passage, written four hundred years before Christ, is always bound to move a Christian deeply. Serious philosophical thinking here surmises that the completely just man in this world must be the crucified just man; something is sensed of that revelation of man which comes to pass on the Cross.

The fact that when the perfectly just man appeared he was crucified, delivered up by justice to death, tells us pitilessly who man is: thou art such, man, that thou canst not bear the just man—that he who simply loves becomes a fool, a scourged criminal, an outcast. Thou art such because, unjust thyself, thou dost always need the injustice of the next man in order to feel excused, and thus canst not tolerate the just man who seems to rob thee of this excuse. Such art thou. Saint John summarized all this in the “Ecce homo” (“Look, this is [the] man!”) of Pilate, which means quite fundamentally: this is how it is with man; this is man.

- Pope Benedict, then Cardinal Ratzinger  from Co-Workers of the Truth

And spotted elsewhere:

Exquisit Corpse

Jesus came to Bethany, where Lazarus was, whom Jesus had raised
from the dead. There they made him a supper.
—John 12:1-2

Four days dead and sipping soup, Lazarus
Sits up, grunts, asks, “What’s today?” He reeks
Of tomb, but no one blanches at this banquet.

Sister Martha feeds him, wipes his chin, reminding him
Of time and mass and the unforgiving weight of resuscitation.
There’s that late-charge he thought he was clear of,

And the pruning, and that long look a bar-maid
Once gave him, but that’s all in Lazarus’ moldy brain.
The guests merely gape; the vacuum of the tomb

Has sucked every verb from the house, but Mary
Has an idea. She produces a jar of nard, pure, priceless,
And gloppy as death. She smashes it like some Jeremiah,

Peeling the fractured alabaster, lavishing the ooze
On Jesus’ chapped knees and feet. All stand transfixed,
But Lazarus’ eyes are still on Martha’s spoon,

Hovering a bit out of reach. Slowly he searches the room
For an explanation. There’s Mary, as busy as a Martha,
And Martha, nonplussed, her heart churning envy and disgust.

What kind of household is this, Lazarus wonders,
Where the dead are fed and the living embalmed?
Nothing sealed is safe; nothing at rest left undisturbed

By the merciless provocations of the living.

Source: “Exquisite Corpse” by Scott Dalgarno from America Magazine , Vol. 192
No. 9 (3/14/2005).

Good Clean Fun I Suppose

So the whole floor was boppin' over it being National Pi Day the other day. Much overkill if you ask me although I could be a spoilsport. There was loads of sugar-laden treats and someone went to the enormous trouble of printing off about the first two or three hundred numbers to the left of the decimal point of the famous value. A banner of hundreds of 8 ½ by 11 sheets displaying parts the number were posted to the cube walls lining the floor. It seemed to shout: “someone has way too much time on their hands.” There were “Pi” t-shirts on sale and many were wearing them. The fuss seems altogether a bit much although it may be simply that I'm unimpressed by virtue of being in the shadow of a much larger event, that of the papal news.