The Debt Ceiling, Fail-Safe, and Fire Ants

Jonathan Alter has a nice piece at Bloomberg on the debt ceiling.

Alter gets some bonus points for his discussion of the wonky Fail-Safe, though not as many as if he'd mentioned the 1962 novel and not just the 1964 film. I've read the novel several times since discovering it in our middle school library. I like it a lot. The movie, which I saw at Film Forum a few years ago is not as good as the novel, but the novel sets a high bar (for the sort of thing it is anyways).  The plot and conclusion (no spoilers!) are still profoundly upsetting in the film version, but the back-story is not explained as effectively. IMDB points out that the movie will air next Saturday, July 9, on TCM at 8 P.M. It's also coming to Lincoln Center's Walter Reade theater as part of a retrospective on director Sidney Lumet later this month, where there will be a Q&A with screenwriter Walter Bernstein.

(The live television adaption in 2000 was technically interesting and impressive, but ultimately not as good as either the novel or the movie. The sometimes odd casting choices did it no favors.)

But returning to the article, the part about Grover Norquist is fun:

Norquist Looms

Grover Norquist, the anti-tax crusader recently described by Alan Simpson as “the most powerful man in America, including the president,” has convinced the majority of House members to sign his pledge to oppose all tax increases. He’ll fight even these fail-safe triggers, just as he fought them under the first President Bush.

But even being the dark prince of the GOP doesn't prevent Stephen Colbert from stealing the show right from under you, though Norquist has a pretty good comeback:

(When Stephen Colbert asked Norquist this week whether he would support a tax increase if it would save grandmothers from being bitten to death by angry fire ants, he said: “I think we console ourselves with the fact that we have pictures and memories.”)

Freemasons!

In my last blog mention of Freemasonry in May 2010, I wrote

When Baronius brought out a book on Freemasonry a while back, we joked that you're not really a traditionalist publishing house until you have a book on your list about the evils of Freemasonry. This despite Masonic plots not being high on the list of things most people, even traditionalists, worry about these days.

Now a Catholic prelate is talking about Freemasonry again. This time because of the anglican ordinariates. In an address at an "Ordinariate Information Day", Bishop Peter Elliott, Auxiliary of Melbourne mentioned two specific obstacles that might keep Anglicans out of an Australian ordinariate. He said, "Again I need to raise a delicate but unavoidable issue. I urge Ordinariate-bound Anglicans who have remarried after divorce to take your situation to a diocesan marriage tribunal so that your reconciliation in the Ordinariate will in no way be impeded next year." This problem has been widely discussed. But the followup paragraph was a bit of a surprise

Another question is membership of a Masonic lodge. In spite of what you might hear from time to time, Catholics are not permitted to be Freemasons. Men seeking to enter the Ordinariate will need to resign from the lodge. This raises the spiritual challenge, whether commitment to Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour and membership of his Church takes priority in your life.

Don't be mislead, the Catholic Church hadn't ever relaxed its stance on Masonry (as Cardinal Ratzinger reiterated in 1983), but it's not something you've heard prelates talking about since at least Bishop Bruskewitz's excommunication of Freemasons (along with SSPX members, Call to Action members, and Planned Parenthood supporters among other groups) in 1996 (confirmed in 2006).

There's actually been a blowup over freemasonry in the Church of England as a result of the ordinariates.

It turns out that the man appointed as the new Anglican Bishop of Ebbsfleet  (the previous holder of the office, the now Msgr. Andrew Burnham, resigned to become a Roman Catholic), the Rev. Jonathan Baker, was a Freemason and indeed a national chaplain for the organization in England. It didn't stop his appointment, though the Archbishop of Canterbury apparently asked him to consider resigning his membership, which the Bishop-elect has now done.

Back in 2003, Rowan Williams apologized to Freemasons after making harshly critical comments about "The Craft".

Catechism In France

In its latest issue, First Things carries a review (subscription only for now at least) by Eleanor Everett Pettus of a new book by Brigham Young University professor Karen Carter, Creating Catholics: Catechism and Primary Education in Early Modern France. Pettus writes

Before the seventeenth century, few rural French laymen knew basic prayers, let alone many tenets of the Christian faith, but by 1800 almost every child in France had access to some form of religious education. Boys as well as girls were expected to recite the entire catechism as a condition for first communion—and the could. ... By 1800, though ... Bishops took personal responsibility for educating the young laity, selecting a catechism and distributing it in increasing numbers. During the bishops' visitations, the curés were required to produce children who could recite that catechism perfectly.

This history lesson was particularly interesting to me, because I have just started reading John S. Kennedy's Light on the Mountain: The Story of LaSalette.

La Salette was a Marian apparition that took place in France in the 19th century. Here's an excerpt from the account from the Catholic Encyclopedia

On 19 September, 1846, about three o'clock in the afternoon in full sunlight, on a mountain about 5918 feet high and about three miles distant from the village of La Salette-Fallavaux, it is related that two children, a shepherdess of fifteen named Mélanie Calvat, called Mathieu, and a shepherd-boy of eleven named Maximin Giraud, both of them very ignorant, beheld in a resplendent light a "beautiful lady" clad in a strange costume. Speaking alternately in French and in patois, she charged them with a message which they were "to deliver to all her people". After complaining of the impiety of Christians, and threatening them with dreadful chastisements in case they should persevere in evil, she promised them the Divine mercy if they would amend.

The story of the rise of religious education in France is useful background for understanding Kennedy's emphasis on the seers' religious backgrounds.

What prayers did Melanie, who had had not a day's schooling, know? The "Our Father" and the "Hail Mary" in patois, for she ahd just scraps of French. These prayers her mother had taught her, that perpetually worried woman who distractedly wondered what would ever become of her scrawny little ones. A few bits of the catechism, too, Mme. Mathieu had drilled into her daughter at long intervals. But they were no more than odd bits, which Melanie could repeat only laboriously and understood hardly at all. She had been to church but a few times in her life. Wasn't there the begging to be done, or the duty demanded by closefisted employers who considered Sunday simply another day of work? Fourteen years old, almost fifteen and she had not yet made her first Communion. How could she have? That had to be prepared for, at length in catechism classes conducted by the curé of Corps, M. Mélin, and he had not so much as set eyes on this professional herder, generally so far from home.

Objects of Art and Ritual Objects

Sandro Magister's recent column "Only Beauty Will Save Us" excerpts from art historian and "immortel" Jean Clair's speech to the "Court of the Gentiles" in Paris in March.

He writes

How many of the works in the state museums concern Catholic iconography? 60 percent? 70 percent? From the crucifixions to the depositions in the tomb, from the circumcisions to the martyrs, from the nativities to the Saint Francis of Assisis . . . Unlike the Orthodox who kneel and pray before icons, even when they are still found in museums, it is rare, in the grand gallery of the Louvre, to see a believer stop and pray in front of a Christ on the cross or in front of a Madonna. Should we regret this? Sometimes I think so. Should the Church ask for the restitution of its assets? I tend to think this also. But the Church no longer has any power, unlike the Vanuatu or the Haida Indians of British Colombia, who have obtained the restitution of the instruments of their faith, masks and totems . . . Should the Church be ashamed of having been at the origin of the most prodigious visual treasures that have ever existed? Being unable to have them back, could it not at least become aware of the duty not to leave them without explanation in front of millions of museum visitors?

I think about this every time I go to the Met. Could not, for some objects at least, some accommodation be made. Could relics be venerated liturgically? Could chalices be used, say, once every ten years without seriously endangering them. Could we sing a Missa Cantata (because they probably wouldn't let us use incense and thus a Solemn Mass is out) on a portable altar in the Fuentiduena Chapel at the Cloisters. Etc.

The Boys of Pointe du Hoc

Monday was the 67th anniversary of the Allied landings in Normandy, "D-Day". National Review Online reminded us that it is also, therefore, the 27th anniversary of the speech Ronald Reagan gave on the 40th anniversary of the landings, "The Boys of Pointe du Hoc".

What struck me in reading the text of the speech (which you can also watch below), was the strong religious language in it

What inspired all the men of the armies that met here? We look at you, and somehow we know the answer. It was faith and belief; it was loyalty and love.

The men of Normandy had faith that what they were doing was right, faith that they fought for all humanity, faith that a just God would grant them mercy on this beachhead or on the next. It was the deep knowledge -- and pray God we have not lost it -- that there is a profound, moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest. You were here to liberate, not to conquer, and so you and those others did not doubt your cause. And you were right not to doubt.

You all knew that some things are worth dying for. One's country is worth dying for, and democracy is worth dying for, because it's the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man. All of you loved liberty. All of you were willing to fight tyranny, and you knew the people of your countries were behind you.

The Americans who fought here that morning knew word of the invasion was spreading through the darkness back home. They fought -- or felt in their hearts, though they couldn't know in fact, that in Georgia they were filling the churches at 4 a.m., in Kansas they were kneeling on their porches and praying, and in Philadelphia they were ringing the Liberty Bell.

Something else helped the men of D-day: their rockhard belief that Providence would have a great hand in the events that would unfold here; that God was an ally in this great cause. And so, the night before the invasion, when Colonel Wolverton asked his parachute troops to kneel with him in prayer he told them: Do not bow your heads, but look up so you can see God and ask His blessing in what we're about to do. Also that night, General Matthew Ridgway on his cot, listening in the darkness for the promise God made to Joshua: ``I will not fail thee nor forsake thee.''

These are the things that impelled them; these are the things that shaped the unity of the Allies.

...

Here, in this place where the West held together, let us make a vow to our dead. Let us show them by our actions that we understand what they died for. Let our actions say to them the words for which Matthew Ridgway listened: ``I will not fail thee nor forsake thee.''

Strengthened by their courage, heartened by their value [valor], and borne by their memory, let us continue to stand for the ideals for which they lived and died.

Thank you very much, and God bless you all.

Can you imagine President Obama giving that speech? Or even President Bush? How about presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty?

The question always arises though, was this sincere religious belief—civil and personal religion, if not institutional religion— or was this acting?

I remember Ronald Reagan as president, but just barely. Being born in 1981, my earliest strongly political memories are of the 1988 presidential election. But working after college as a research assistant on a biography of Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese, I got to know the man, to the extent one can from reading books, as I got to read all the major biographies, many of the memoirs written by administration figures, and some other books like the excellent and important Reagan in His Own Hand. My verdict from that study was that this is not just great speechwriting (by Peggy Noonan), but that these religious sentiments were parts of Reagan's true self.

Fountain Pens: A Guide to Their Construction

This is just a link, but I liked it. Rick Connor's got a great site on fountain pens, including this guide to their construction.

UPDATE: Hah! I already linked to this page back in 2008.

Jimmy Fallon On Why He Doesn't Go to Church

Comedian and former altar boy Jimmy Fallon talks with Terry Gross (story) (transcript) about why he doesn't go to Church anymore:

GROSS: Do you still go to church?

Mr. FALLON: I don't go to - I tried to go back. When I was out in L.A. and I was like kind of struggling for a bit I went to church for a while, but it's kind of, it's gotten gigantic now for me. It's like too, there's a band. There's a band there now and you got to, you have to hold hands with people through the whole mass now, and I don't like doing that. You know, I mean it used to be the shaking hands piece was the only time you touched each other.

GROSS: Mm-hmm.

Mr. FALLON: Now I'm holding now I'm lifting people. Like Simba.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. FALLON: I'm holding them (Singing) ha nah hey nah ho.

(Speaking) I'm I'm doing too much. I don't want - there's Frisbees being thrown, there's beach balls going around, people waving lighters, and I go this is too much for me. I want the old way. I want to hang out with the, you know, with the nuns, you know, that was my favorite type of mass, and the Grotto and just like straight up, just mass-mass.

Sure, some of this is comic bluster, but it's not all shtick.

"The Best Guitar Mass"

This past Sunday, we had a Solemn Mass and Benediction (with a Te Deum) in the afternoon at Holy Innocents (no Vespers this week) in thanksgiving for Fr. James Miara's 10th anniversary of ordination.  

The choir sang Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli for the ordinary and the schola (including your faithful correspondent) the Gregorian propers.  At the offertory, the choir sang Gregor Aichinger's Regina Cœli with accompaniment on lute and baroque guitar, causing a friend to quip, "That's the best guitar Mass I've ever attended." I'd embed a performance of the piece from YouTube, but I don't like any of them.

Picture above via Teddy Barboza. I'll link to more photos if they become available.

This Beats the Submerged Gong

The New York Times reported last Sunday on a production of "Sonntag", the final opera in Karlheinz Stockhausen's seven opera "Licht" cycle.

The article notes that

Despite several attempts no company has found a way to pull off “Mittwoch” (“Wednesday”), partly because it incorporates Stockhausen’s infamous “Helicopter String Quartet,” in which each member of the ensemble flies in a separate helicopter, but also because the music is so fiendishly difficult.

However, while the opera that contains it has not been mounted, the string quartet itself has been. A 1995 article from the Times describes a performance of the work:

As part of this summer's Holland Festival, the composer staged the premiere of the Helicopter Quartet, written for four string instruments and, no less, four helicopters.

The work took off from a field on the outskirts of Amsterdam, at the Westergasfabriek, a former gasworks that has become a theater. Here, in the gentle evening light last month, Mr. Stockhausen said goodbye to the members of the Arditti String Quartet as each went off to his own helicopter and pilot.

Somewhat bemused, the audience stayed behind in the theater, with Mr Stockhausen in their midst, directing the event. At a large control table, he mixed the video images and the haunting tremolos that were sent down from the heavens and projected into the theater. Other sets of microphones picked up the whir of the motorblades, also delivering them to the composer's mixing desk. The audience could follow the event through banks of loudspeakers and television monitors that carried images from cameras aboard the aircraft.
...
The concert's four helicopter pilots belong to a stunt team of the Dutch Air Force known as the Grasshoppers, but the composer declared them to be musicians because the sounds of their engines were an intrinsic part of the highly detailed score. The pilots "played," so to speak, as their aircraft changed speed or turned, maneuvers that to the keen ear yielded different timbres from the rotorblades. It had taken several days of testing to know which microphone position on the rotor would yield the most desirable rendering.

Here's some video from another performance:

The American Colonel Who Spared Chartres

Chartres Cathedral is (as you all know) one of the world's greatest architectural and spiritual monuments. It survived a plot to blow it up during the French Revolution. Less well known, is that it came close to being badly damaged by shelling during the Second World War. Worried that its tower was being used to direct attacks against the allied forces, an artillery attack was planned. Colonel Welborn Griffith volunteered to go enter the city and determine whether the Cathedral was occupied by Axis forces. It wasn't and the Cathedral was spared further damage, unlike the ancient Abbey of Monte Cassino, which was leveled in the fighting in Italy.

Shortly after his reconnaissance, Col. Griffith was killed in action. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross:

The President of the United States of America, authorized by Act of Congress July 9, 1918, takes pride in presenting the Distinguished Service Cross (Posthumously) to Colonel Welborn Barton Griffith, Jr. (ASN: 0-16194), United States Army, for extraordinary heroism in connection with military operations against an armed enemy while serving as Operations Officer (G-3) with Headquarters, XX Corps, in action against enemy forces on 16 August 1944 at Chartres and Leves, France. On 16 August 1944, Colonel Griffith entered the city of Chartres, France, in order to check the actual locations and dispositions of units of the *** Armored Division which was occupying the city. Upon observing fire being directed at the cathedral in the center of the city, with utter disregard for his own safety, Colonel Griffith, accompanied by an enlisted man, searched the cathedral and finding that there were no enemy troops within, signaled for cessation of fire. Continuing his inspection of outlying positions north of the city, he suddenly encountered about fifteen of the enemy. He fired several shots at them, then proceeded to the nearest outpost of our forces at which point a tank was located. Arming himself with an M-1 rifle and again with complete disregard for his own safety, Colonel Griffith climbed upon the tank directing it to the enemy forces he had located. During the advance of the tank he was exposed to intense enemy machinegun, rifle, and rocket-launcher fire and it was during this action, in the vicinity of Leves, France, that he was killed.

General Orders: Headquarters, Third U.S. Army, General Orders No. 75 (1944)

Action Date: 16-Aug-44

Service: Army

Rank: Colonel

Company: Headquarters

Division: XX Corps

via Jay Nordlinger's post to The Corner. Citation via Military Times.

An Extreme Test

I came across a waiver for participation in a sporting event that starts with this language:

I acknowledge that this sport is an extreme test of a person’s physical and mental limits and carries with it the potential for death, serious injury and property loss.

What sport you ask? Ski jumping? Paragliding? NASCAR? Nope, it's Pétanque.

Sandburg the Surrealist (and other attributes...)

Last Sunday, I picked up a copy of the Carl Sandburg anthology, Harvest Poems: 1910-1960 from one of the booksellers who have tables on the west side of Broadway in the 70's.

Though others of his poems, particularly "Grass"—and his biography of Lincoln—are well know Sandburg is perhaps best remembered by the wider public for his widely anthologized poem "Fog":

THE fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

That's not entirely typical of the poetry in this anthology though, much of which is closely observed and focused on industrial, not natural, topics.  For instance in "Psalm of Those Who Go Forth Before Daylight"

...
The rolling-mill men and the sheet-steel men are brothers of
cinders; they empty cinders out of their shoes after the
days work; they ask their wives to fix burnt holes in the
knees of their trousers; their necks and ears are covered
wit a smut; they scour their necks and ears; they are
brothers of cinders.

[Sadly I don't have the html skillz to reproduce the formatting. Each line after the first is indented.]

The tone of some of these poems compares in a way to Peter Maurin's Easy Essays, but without the direct didacticism.  I think this is partly a result of their shared fondness for the word "they".  For instance in Maurin's "Selling Their Labor"

When the workers
sell their labor
to the capitalists
or accumulators of labor
they allow the capitalists
or accumulators of labor
to accumulate their labor.
And when the capitalists
or accumulators of labor
have accumulated so much
of the workers’ labor
that they do no longer
find it profitable
to buy the workers’ labor
then the workers
can no longer sell their labor
to the capitalists
or accumulators of labor.
And when the workers
can no longer
sell their labor
to the capitalists
or accumulators of labor
they can no longer buy
the products of their labor.
And that is what the workers get
for selling their labor.

I found an amusing irony in "Number Man". Sandburg dedicates this poem "for the ghost of Johann Sebastian Bach".

...
He was born to wonder about numbers.

He balanced fives against tens
and made them sleep together
and love each other.
...
He mananged eights and nines,
gave them prophet beards,
marched them into mists and mountains.

He added all the numbers he knew,
multiplied them by new-found numbers
and called it a prayer of Numbers.
...
He knew love numbers, luck numbers,
how the sea and the stars
are made and held by numbers
...

The irony is that Bach's music is highly numerical and Sandburg, despite paying tribute to this quality in Bach, writes free verse that aggressively spurns meter, the analogical quality in poetry.

So finally the surrealism, which prompted this post in the first place, it's a bit from "Arithmetic". After reading a whole bunch of poems like "Psalm of Those Who Go Forth Before Daylight" (quoted above), I was not expecting something like this:

If you have two animal crackers, one good and one bad, and you eat one and a striped
zebra with streaks all over him eats the other, how many animal crackers will you
have if somebody offers you five six seven and you say No no no and you say Nay
nay nay and you say Nix nix nix?

Wrapping up, a couple words on this edition. It features an adequate preface by Mark Van Doren (who was an important influence on Thomas Merton and who is perhaps today not as much remembered as his son Charles Van Doren) focusing on Sandburg's humor and a valuable excerpt from Sandburg's own "Notes for a Preface" from his Complete Poems.

Trees and the Abbey

On their blog, the Sons of the Most Holy Redeemer have an interesting angle on the trees used to decorate Westminster Abbey for the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge:

It is related of the confessor Dom John Baptist de Feckenham, the last Abbot of Westminster, that he was engaged in planting Elm trees when he was handed the message which, by an act of Parliament, dissolved his monastery and exiled the monks.

The bearer remarked, with a significant smile, that he had planted those trees in vain; for neither he nor his monks would enjoy them.

“Not in vain,” answered the saintly Abbot. “Those who come after me may, perhaps, be scholars and lovers of retirement; and whilst walking under the shade of these trees they may sometimes think of the olden religion of England and the last Abbot of this place.” And he went on with his planting.

May Day!

A Friend's Photo

This year we hit the flowering tree sweet spot for Easter.

Gordon Ramsey Complains About Chauvinism

In this clip from Kitchen Nightmares:



Irony! This was presumably filmed before sexual harassment complaints led to a staff walkout at Gordon Ramsey at the London.

Universalism: Ascendancy or Eclipse?

The New York Times Book Review printed an essay this Sunday by Lauren F. Winner on the controversy surrounding Rob Bell's book Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. Bell's been accused of universalism by his critics. I haven't read his book and don't want to comment particularly on that, but on the general issue of universalism in America and its history.

Winner places Bell's work in the context of the American tradition of books about heaven, including an 1869 novel by Massachusetts writer Elizabeth Stuart Phelps "offering a comforting view of the afterlife to women who had lost loved ones in the Civil War" as a bio from the Camelot Project puts it. Winner also cites Mitch Albom’s “Five People You Meet in Heaven,” and books by Don Piper and Todd Burpo.

Winner writes this about the history of universalism:

For all the controversy, this book’s argument has been building for a long time. During the 18th and 19th centuries, many evangelicals rejected universalism, even as it began to gain traction among liberal Protestants. Yet for the last half-century, universalism has been subtly reshaping North American evangelicalism, to the alarm of many evangelical leaders. As early as 1965, the theologian J. I. Packer warned that many evangelicals had “slipped into the practice of living and behaving as if universalism were true,” even though those same functional universalists would never declare a doctrinal commitment to universal salvation. Two decades later, the sociologist James Davison Hunter detected a creeping liberalism in evangelical thought. “There is a pervasive uneasiness both about the nature of hell and about who is relegated to it,” he wrote. “It is an uneasiness which may portend a greater cultural accommodation.” “Love Wins” can be read as a fulfillment of Hunter’s observation.

Reading that previously "evangelicals rejected universalism, even as it began to gain traction among liberal Protestants," and that "for the last half-century, universalism has been subtly reshaping North American evangelicalism," you might think there's been an upward trajectory for universalism, but only because there's a missing part of the story.

Universalist belief was a particular denominational affiliation—and an important one—in 19th century America, like being a Methodist or a Baptist.  There's a collection of historical universalist denominational documents here.  But universalism is no longer the independent force in organized religion it was in the 19th century.  The denominational body that universalists organized long ago merged into the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations and ceased to be either Christian or universalist in theology. Part of what that means is that some of the evangelical warnings were correct. When you endorse universalism, moving away from the doctrine of historical orthodoxy and the Bible, you predictably start sliding away from Christianity in general.

P.S. One could read the essay and think Rob Bell started getting blow-back for his beliefs when the promotion for his book began, but that started years ago.  In fact, I'd be unsurprised if controversy over his views is part of what made his book attractive to his publishers at HarperOne in the first place.

P.P.S. This essay was much more of an essay than the one they printed a few weeks back on Green's Dictionary of Slang, which was really more of a review. The essay is important and we need our publications to preserve the places available for it.

Touch Me Not

This post goes in a number of different—though related—directions. It's somewhat rough, but... well here you go:

Dicit ei Iesus: Noli me tangere, nondum enim ascendi ad Patrem meum: vade autem ad fratres meos, et dic eis: Ascendo ad Patrem meum, et Patrem vestrum, Deum meum, et Deum vestrum.

Jesus saith to her: Do not touch me, for I am not yet ascended to my Father. But go to my brethren, and say to them: I ascend to my Father and to your Father, to my God and your God. (John 20:17)

I've been reading José Rizal's novel Noli Me Tangere, an indictment of colonial (and clerical) rule in the Phillipines.   (There was a hiatus due to losing it on the train and having to repurchase it.)  Described, reasonably, by Penguin's editorial material as an anticlerical novel, I'm struck by the irony of an anticlerical novel that takes its title from the Gospel of John.

Once you've allowed clericalism to define the terms of the debate, even to be anti-clerical is to participate in the religion based culture on which anti-clericalism is parasitic.  In a truly secular society, anti-clericalism is nonsensical.

I'm also reading Patrick W. Carey's fascinating biography, Orestes A. Brownson: American Religious Weathervane. In Carey's discussion of Brownson's reading of French writers, particularly the Saint-Simonians.

With the exception of [Henri-Benjamin] Constant [de Rebecque], who perceived religion primarily as religious sentiment (a view that was vigorously criticized by the Saint-Simonians), most of the other French writers understood religion or Christianity in its historical and social dimensions, and they all, even Constant, understood the significant role religious institutions had played in history and would continue to play in the post-Revolutionary world of early nineteenth-century France. These writers had what André Siegfried called "the ineradicably catholic habit of the French mind." Even when the French writers were anti-clerical or anti-Catholic, they were catholic in outlook because they could not separate religion from politics, history, or society.

Even when they're anti-clerical, the clerical/non-clerical distinction pervades their thinking.  This is in some ways similar to Émile Durkheim's sacred/profane distinction.  The sacred is that which is set apart or forbidden (as clerics are).  In Durkheim's model of how religion works, making this distinction is the fundamental characteristic of religion.  But the sacred (in Durkheim's understanding) is not necessarily good, it can also be evil.  Interestingly then, an anti-clerical view shares the same sacred/profane split as a clerical view, but reverses the polarity of how it views whether the sacred things in question (clerics) are good or evil.  Of course, since Durkheim is French, his views about religion may be a result of being immersed in the clerical/anti-clerical world-view.

I came across something similar in Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog. Parts of that novel are intense indictments of trends in philosophy (e.g. phenomenology).  One of the main characters presents herself as being anti-philosophical.  But, just as the anti-clerical view is parasitic on the clerical view, when you attack philosophy in the way the book does, you accidentally find yourself doing philosophy as you try to explain why this or that philosophy is nonsensical.

At left: a detail of the painting "Noli Me Tangere" by Hans Holbein the Younger, which appears to feature Karate Jesus.

"New York's Most Obnoxious Prophets"

"Black Israelites" preaching in my neighborhood in Queens.

The Village Voice has an article about Black Israelites in their most recent issue.  It's not a great article, full of quirky detail in the alt-weekly way and light on theology, but the writer got good access to one of the Black Israelite groups.

A Hero of Our Time?

I've recently finished reading Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time in the lovely Hesperus Press edition.  The book is a nice size, with easy-to-read type and a durable paperback format, with a fold-over outer cover.

I can't judge the fidelity to the Russian of the translation by Hugh Aplin, but it reads well in English. In an interview with Ready, Steady, Book, Aplin calls A Hero of Our Time, "right up there at the top of my list of favourites," and it shows.

Lermontov seems to me to be somewhat the anti-Jane Austen.  His hero (better anti-hero) is male, rather than female; Russian, rather than English; and so despicable that the respectable reader roots against him, rather than for him. But the social settings and the concerns and preoccupations of the characters are mutatis mutandis quite similar: the capital and the provinces, imperial adventures, military officers, affairs of the heart, engagements, marriage prospects, and the gambling tables.  The spa city of Pyatigorsk strongly recalls Bath, the setting for Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.

For more about Jane Austen and Bath, click on this handy reference card:

One question that presents itself: is Lermontov's anti-hero, Pechorin--ironically labeled by the title "A Hero of Our Time" also--and still ironically--a hero of our own time?  His obsessions—sex, wealth, social status—are certainly not that different from the obsessions of our time.  Neither are the conditions of his society—social stratification, endless military conflict, youth in search of excitement.

But if he's a "hero" of Lermontov's time and of our own time, is he perhaps a "hero" for all times?  Should we suppose that any time is all that different from any other?  After all, "Nothing under the sun is new, neither is any man able to say: Behold this is new: for it hath already gone before in the ages that were before us." (Ecclesiastes 1:10)

Slavonic, Slavonic, more Slavonic

Saturday, I ended up, by mistake, at St. Nicholas Cathedral on 97th street. By mistake, because I was aiming for the other Russian Orthodox Cathedral, the Synodal Cathedral of Our Lady of the Sign, where I wanted to hear the choir again.  I'd heard them a little over a year ago when the relic of the head of St. John Chrysostom visited from Moscow.

The head of St. John Chrysostom (more photos)

But mixed up the names of the two cathedrals and ended up at the wrong one. I stayed for the Vigil anyways.  Their choir isn't as good as I remember the one at the Synodal Cathedral being, but the Church is one of the most beautiful in Manhattan.

Photo part of a set of the Cathedral by Flickr user Chad Husby

The photo doesn't really do it justice, though part of that is that I visited at dusk.  In the dark Church, the Bishop had the sparkliest miter   This was two hours of solid Church Slavonic, of which I know about 5 words.  Fortunately, the words I know, like "Gospodi, pomiluj" (Lord, have mercy), are repeated often.  People think Latin is a challenge!  I suppose it'd be easier if I had a foundation in Russian.

To the Gates of the Fukushima Daiichi Power Station

The Independent is not the world's greatest newspaper. It's the home of Robert Fisk (who inspired the internet term "fisking"). But, credit where credit is due, they've published an excellent article from Japan. Reporter Daniel Howden travels all the way to the gates of the Fukushima Daiichi Power Station.

Via Jonah's radiation guy, World's Only Rational Man.

Reformed Ex-Felon or Arminian Ex-Felon?

I can't tell if the New York Times is making a theology joke or not with their headline: "A Reformed Ex-Felon in Trouble Once Again". The article is about Barry Minkow who

has made many names for himself: as a boy-wonder entrepreneur, as a Ponzi schemer who served seven years in prison and then reinvented himself as a fraud-detection specialist, government informant and pastor.

His life took another turn when he was charged Thursday with conspiracy to commit securities fraud against the Lennar Corporation, one of the nation’s largest home builders.

The two churches where he was a pastor, the Community Bible Church of San Diego and The Church at Rocky Peak both have statements of belief on their web sites, but they're too sketchy for me to be able to tell if they are Reformed (which in today's Evangelical argot usually means Calvinist), or Arminian, or something else.

Here's an article from the Baptist Press with some background on the revival (so to speak) of Calvinism in the Southern Baptist Convention and the debate over whether it's a blessing or a scourge.

But even though the Times covered the Calvinist revival a bit in their 2009 Mark Driscoll article, I'm guessing there really isn't a wink from the copy editor in the Minkow headline after all.

If you're wondering where Catholics stand on these issues, I recommend (as I have before), James Akin's article "A Tiptoe Through TULIP".

Berlitz Breakup

I've been brushing up a bit on my German.

The book German Step-by-Step professes to offer "a vocabulary of 2,600 words chosen especially for their frequency of use." It has a relentlessly chipper tone:

With GERMAN STEP-BY-STEP [sic], accent and pronunciation problems are solved forever. There will be no need to fear appearing gauche before a waiter or salesperson, no terror at buying a train ticket or sending back a steak cooked rare instead of medium. You will discover the music and rhythym of language as spoken by those born into the culture and tradition of a nation.

So I was somewhat shocked by this example conversation in the section on when to use the familiar "du" form for "you". It goes south fast:

Verliebte gebrauchen auch die Du-Form.
Lovers also use the "you" (familiar) form.

SIE:
Liebst du mich?
Do you love me?

ER:
Ja, mein Schatz.
Yes, my treasure.

Ich liebe dich sehr.
I love you very much.

SIE:
Für immer?
Forever?

ER:
Wer weiß? Wer kann das sagen?
Who knows? Who can say that?

SIE:
Warum sagst du — „Wer weiß?"
Why do you say — "Who knows?"

Du bist ekelhaft!
You are horrible!

Ich hasse dich!
I hate you!

Next time they talk, they may have to switch from "du" back to "Sie".

The Illusionist

I saw The Illusionist Sunday.

My companions didn't like it at all. But really, see this movie for the beautiful visuals and the friendly humor.  Though neither of those things comes across exceptionally well in the trailer below. It's a stunningly picturesque depiction of Scotland, as well as a homage to the then (1950's) vanishing and now vanished world of vaudeville. Like most animation, if you see it, you should do so on as big a screen as you can find.



Seeing this movie on Sunday was the breaking of my resolution to shift money from my movie budget to my book budget (after I spent more than I planned on books on Saturday). But my companions had between them seen almost every other non-obscene movie playing in Midtown and besides the MPAA was warning that the film contained smoking, which is often a good sign (e.g. Thank You For Smoking or Goodnight, and Good Luck).

There's apparently a big scandal about how and whether the "shooting" script and the final film with its publicity materials departs from the original script and does or does work as an apologia (and/or apology and/or apology) for screenwriter Jacques Tati's behaviour towards his illegitimate daughter and/or his younger daughter. (That's a confusing sentence, but the dispute is very much an unsettled one.)

I came to the movie without knowing about all this controversy.  There's some further confusion about the plot, probably partly because the style of the film is to have very little dialog and what little there is is mumbled and often in French or Gaelic. According to the publicity materials:

THE ILLUSIONIST is a story about two paths that cross. An outdated, aging magician, forced to wander from country to country, city to city and station to station in search of a stage to perform his act meets a young girl at the start of her life's journey. Alice is a teenage girl with all her capacity for childish wonder still intact. She plays at being a woman without realizing the day to stop pretending is fast approaching. She doesn't know yet that she loves The Illusionist like she would a father; he already knows that he loves her as he would a daughter. Their destinies will collide, but nothing – not even magic or the power of illusion– can stop the voyage of discovery.

But Roger Ebert read the plot somewhat differently:

The story involves a magician named Tatischeff [Tati's full last name--SJH] who fails in one music hall after another and ends up in Scotland, where at last he finds one fan: A young woman who idealizes him, moves in with him, tends to him, cooks and cleans, and would probably offer sex if he didn’t abstemiously sleep on the couch.

Well, I can see why the family is upset about that movie if it's also about Tati's relationship with his daughters.  I thought of all the controversy when I read Jennifer Reeser's poem "Despair" in this month's First Things. While the poem is in the 2nd person and I can separate the authorial voice from the author, I'd feel awkward to be her daughter right about now.

Saturday in New York (Not the Fourth of July)

Down at St. Michael’s, the Russian Catholic (they might say Russian Orthodox in union with Rome) Church in SoHo, they don’t give up “Alleluia” for Lent—at least during vespers.

After the service ended, I headed a couple blocks down and across Mulberry Street to McNally Jackson Books, an independent bookstore, where I bought three books and left resolving (pace Walker Percy) to go to the movies less frequently to make up for the extravagance. I’ve gotten better at going to the library, but am not any better at returning the books on time. The price advantage over buying books slips away with my impressive ability to rack up late fees. (I'm so good at racking up that I could get a job as a set dresser on The Hustler.)

But returning to the checkout counter at McNally Jackson: the clerk ventured that I had made three fine choices. Flattery will get you everywhere, sir! Truly, I’ve lost his exact words, but they left the impression that it was more than just a case of “The customer is always right.”

It helped though that two of the three were from their recommended picks table, though in one case that was just a coincidence. They were recommending the collected poems of Elizabeth Bishop, which I was coincidentally seeking out. The latest New Criterion reviews an exhibit of the poet’s paintings at James S. Jaffe Rare Books, so I was looking to refamilarize myself before heading up to see them, maybe this weekend.

We read through Geography III in high school. Poems, as the collected works is called, fell open to one of the verses originally collected in Geography III:

In the Waiting Room
In Worcester, Massachusetts,
I went with Aunt Consuelo
to keep her dentist's appointment
and sat and waited for her
in the dentist's waiting room.
It was winter. It got dark
early. The waiting room
was full of grown-up people,
arctics and overcoats,
lamps and magazines.
My aunt was inside
what seemed like a long time
and while I waited and read
the National Geographic
(I could read) and carefully
studied the photographs:
the inside of a volcano,
black, and full of ashes;
then it was spilling over
in rivulets of fire.
...

I love this poem, because it recalls for me so strongly an experience that was part of my childhood, the early darkness of winter afternoons in New England.

The clerk wanted me to know that Poems is part of a publishing project from FSG that also includes a Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence—the power of the independent bookstore with clerks who are encouraged to be knowledgeable about books and urged to sell them intelligently. Amazon.com, actually suggests the same thing, but a visit to a brick and mortar Barnes and Noble wouldn't have.  That book is going on the long-term reading list, the scales tipped for the reason the clerk suggested, insight into the editorial workings of the New Yorker during the years Bishop published there.

Not from the recommendation table was another copy of Noli Me Tangere. I’m on about page eighty and my copy disappeared a week ago into the maw of the LIRR. I’d previously tried to replace it at the Strand, but, if you go to the Strand looking for something in particular, you’re not all that likely to find it, though you may go home with three or four other unrelated things.

But I haven't made any more progress through Noli, because I've been distracted by the other book I bought from the recommendation table: The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson.  Michael Chabon's charming introduction was also published in The Paris Review. Their staff picks pushes a metaphor way to hard in describing the book. I can go with calling it a Viking Hustle and Flow, but Peter Conroy sums up, "After all, it's hard out here for a thane." Ouch.  The new paperback edition from New York Review Books Classics.

After my book binge, I had dinner at Two Boots, something I've somehow managed to miss in my (wow, as of last month, now six years) living in New York City.  Their pizza has a cornmeal dusted crust, which I actually like, but they're much too fond of putting chicken on pizza, something I find entirely inexplicable.  In fact, that and their "funky" decor were probably the two reasons I hadn't eaten at one of their branches already.  But, they manage to serve tasty pizza by the slice that is actually hot, a common failing, so I expect I'll be back again.

The books over movies resolution lasted only slightly more than 24 hours, as a forthcoming post about Sunday will recount.

Rudolf Buchbinder Votes Against "Authenticity" Before He Votes For It

Stuart Isacoff profiles Viennese pianist Rudolf Buchbinder in Thursday's Wall Street Journal. The article's pull quote was the bolded part of this paragraph:

But fitting together, in Mr. Buchbinder's view, never means compromising a personal vision. "When you grow up in Vienna," he explains, "you feel lucky, because you believe you are in the musical center of the world—the home of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Yet the only reason this music is still alive after hundreds of years is that there is no such thing as 'an authentic' interpretation. If there were, the music would be dead. Take a sample of recordings of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony by 10 conductors, and they will all be different. You can't say there is one right way."

Fair enough, but this later paragraph puts a different spin on things:

... Mr. Buchbinder also likes to play music by George Gershwin, though he won't play the "Rhapsody in Blue" with orchestra, because the composer didn't write it for those forces.

Wait. So there's no such thing as authenticity, but he won't play an orchestra arrangement of Rhapsody in Blue, because Gershwin didn't write it for those forces. That seems like a concern about authenticity to me or something very close to it.

What Students Should Learn in College

This is a finished version of a post first drafted in 2005.  On the way are posts about some of the books I've been reading this month.

K. Anthony Appiah in Slate on what students should learn in college:

I've been on committees at a couple of great universities charged with the task and, putting aside the political difficulties (which I guess you can do, if you have a magic wand) you come to see it's one of those problems you can't solve, only manage. Here's the basic dilemma: If you say that a general education should teach you all the stuff worth knowing, there's far too much to fit around a major in a four-year education. If you say, on the other hand, that it should teach you only the essentials, there's too little. You can live a perfectly decent life with what you have to know just to get out of high school; indeed, many people do.

That dilemma is why you can't put aside the political and, more broadly, the philosophical.  Prof. Appiah has settled on a combined platform of equipping students with mathematical tools to participate in the policy debates of society and also broadening them beyond a parochially national perspective.  Call it technocratic cosmopolitanism.  Dude, at least it's an ethos.

But, it is an ethos.  This is a solution to a philosophical problem.   Assuming the purpose of teaching is to improve students' lives, answering the question, "What should a university teach?" requires answering the question, "What is the good life?" or "How shall we live?"  When we seek to answer that question in a communal context, like a university, and act on our answer, we're also engaging in politics.

But seeking to set aside the political, which in our society almost always involves setting aside normative philosophical judgments, prevents us from judging the solution in the proper context.

Some colleges judge knowledge of the Bible to be more important than courses in statistics or a junior year abroad.  If he hadn't set aside the political and, by implication, normative philosophical considerations, Prof. Appiah might be able to persuade them.

Bonus Big Lebowski/Walter Sobchak/Slate content: "Walter Sobchak, Neocon: The prescient politics of The Big Lebowski".

The Melodica

There was a melodica player on the subway last night.

The melodica has all the irritation of the accordion with none of the charm.

But check out James Howard Young's multi-tracked melodica project:



For all your melodica needs, Melodicas.com appears to be pretty comprehensive.

St. Patrick's Day

“Ut Christiani ita et Romani sitis.”

“As you are children of Christ, so be you children of Rome.”

Ex Dictis S. Patricii, Book of Armagh, fol. 9

The County Mayo Association with a statue of Our Lady of Knock at the 2010 Philadelphia St. Patrick's Parade (Photo by Jeff Meade from Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution License)

Does the Phil Care About Selling New Music?

I got a marketing e-mail today from the New York Philharmonic pitching the 2011-2012 season.

Since taking the podium at the New York Philharmonic, Alan Gilbert has been noted for his promotion of new music (or at least "newer" music). The Times (of London) wrote in January 2010:

For the moment, however, Gilbert resembles a more controversial figure in the orchestra’s past. Pierre Boulez enjoyed confronting the world’s most conservative audiences with the world’s most modern music, resulting in a string of critical successes and box-office failures. Since then new music has been kept at arm’s length. Until now.

“New music wasn’t presented in the best possible light in the past,” Gilbert admits. “It wasn’t clear why the orchestra was playing it or whether the orchestra really believed in it.”

The “Boléro effect”, as he calls it, which says that if you put a piece such as Ravel’s Boléro at the end of a programme you can slip anything else in earlier in the evening, was all too common. “You may be able to get people to buy tickets this way, but the clear message it sends out is that we don’t really believe in this,” he says. “It says: ‘Deal with it and we’ll get on to the fun stuff later.’ That is not a message we believe in.”

Which brings us back to the marketing e-mail. It leaves me with the impression that the new music is backed with something less than the full faith and credit of the New York Philharmonic. The Phil's Phlacks write:

The new 2011-12 season of Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic has been announced! It is no less than a feast of musical masterpieces — three Mahler symphonies, a festival of Beethoven symphonies, Mozart’s Mass in C minor, and much more — plus exciting premieres from the composers of today.

If new music is important, it's important enough to give us a name. "Exciting premieres"? This breaks the basic rule of writing: Show don't tell. Who are these exciting new composers? The copy doesn't persuade me. If the composers' names aren't worthy to stand alongside Mahler, Beethoven, and Mozart in the marketing e-mail—not as equals necessarily, but at least with a second billing that mentions their names—why should we be excited about them?

As for myself, I'm hoping to hear them do Leos Janácek's The Cunning Little Vixen in June.

America's Newspaper of Record

...that's the New York Post, for those of you not up on your John Derbyshire sobriquets.

Here's a couple recent oddities from its hallowed Hamiltonian pages.

Today's Classroom Extra (no link) is a short biography of Albert Einstein. Suggested classroom activities include, "Write a report explaining Einstein's theory of relativity." I'm sure the kids will get right on that!

Last Week's Post included Page Six Magazine featured an article, "When Preppy Weds Hippie". If I told you the article was about Lauren Bush, Princeton graduate, granddaughter and niece of presidents, product of a high school the local Chronicle called "one of Houston's most exclusive prep schools", you'd probably ask, "So who's the hippy?"

But no, she's the hippy. The prep is David Lauren, son of the Polo Ralph Lauren founder.

There's a whole discussion to be had about whether Polo Ralph Lauren is really preppy or is just an appropriation of a culture or even a parody. But, we'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Not exactly...

Fr. Thomas Kocik wrote a post recently on the New Liturgical Movement about a proposed audio-book style version of the Latin Nova Vulgata.

This strikes me as an odd and not particularly useful project in this post-Summorum Pontificum world.

Vatican Press, in partnership with Faith Comes By Hearing (a non-profit, donor-driven, interdenominational ministry committed to the mission of reaching poor and illiterate people worldwide with the Word of God in audio), is preparing to record the Latin edition of the New Testament, the Neo-Vulgate,

A Latin edition. More on this below.

for use in Catholic seminaries, parishes, and personal individual study worldwide. The Neo-Vulgate is currently the official or "typical" Latin edition published by the Catholic Church for use in the Roman Rite. As the first vernacular translation of the Bible, it is only fitting that it be among the languages in which Faith Comes By Hearing makes Sacred Scripture available in audio using the rendering of the translator, St. Jerome (342–420 A.D.).

What? Jerome did two translations of the Bible into Latin. The Neo-Vulgate is not either of them. It's a new edition. Hence the "neo" or "nova" in the name.

It will also be available for free download onto technology devices for academic and devotional use.

Those of us who are regularly worshiping in Latin and studying the Latin scriptures for that purpose are overwhelmingly not using the Nova Vulgata, but the 1962 missal versions. Serious academics working on Biblical studies are only using the Latin (they use the Greek and the Hebrew) if they are doing specialized historical studies on previous interpretation (e.g. editions of sermons written by those who used the Vulgate). But they're not using the Nova Vulgata for these studies either.

The Latin Vulgate is the substratum for the prayers of the Roman liturgy and offers the spiritual milieu for it. I ask you to consider giving this worthwhile project your prayerful and financial support. To hear, as well as to read, the Holy Scriptures in Latin – the first language into which the original Hebrew and Greek were translated – would be a fine source for reinforcement of biblically grounded faith and cultural enrichment.

There's a historical error here too.  The first language into which the original Hebrew of the Torah was translated wasn't Latin, but Aramaic and then later the Greek Septuagint.

A Life at the Track is built from Days at the Races

I've just finished reading Ted McClelland's Horseplayers: Life at the Track.

I live right near Aqueduct, though I've never made it out there, but I have been to the summer meet at Saratoga once.

The book is well done, but it betrays its origins as an edited and reworked version of newspaper columns (even though he had a book contract already while the columns were being written.) The profiles of the people he meets at the track don't go as deep as you might like: newspaper column depth rather than magazine column or book depth. The same book suffers from the same difficulty as a memoir or as participatory journalism, never digging as deep into the authors psyche as a book like Ted Conover's Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing. Of course, Newjack wasn't Conover's first rodeo as Horseplayers seems to be for McClelland. I'll be keeping an eye out for a sophmore effort.

I discovered the helpful glossary at the back only when I had finished the book, but there was still no entry there for exacta! (I used the internet to look it up.)

One more thing about reading Horseplayers: a little more knowledge about handicapping gives me a sharper appreciation for this bit from A Day at the Races:

So Good It's Bad

Dana Stevens writes in Slate about Love Guru:

There are good movies. There are bad movies. There are movies so bad they're good (though, strangely, not the reverse).

I'm not so sure this is true.  Basically, the point here is that there multiple meanings for the words "good" and "bad".

But given this fact, aren't there all sorts of movies so "good" they're bad? Think, for instance of "morally improving" movies.  Pauline Kael has an interesting comment about this in Afterglow: A Last Conversation With Pauline Kael:

[T]hey thought I was awful for panning the kind of movies I panned, the earnest movies, what's now called the independent film—the movies that have few aesthetic dimensions but are moral and have lessons and all. There was a great deal of sentiment for that kind of movie at The New Yorker, and from its readers. This was, after all, in the sixties and seventies, and New York was still full of a lot of refugees from Hitler, and they took movies very seriously, and morally. And my frivolous tone really bugged them. ...

Today, there's so much more of a feeling for films as aesthetic objects rather than as morally improving objects. But I was writing for a magazine that stood for moral improvement—New Yorker editorials during my years there could be so abstractly moralizing. There were things there that were so at odds with what I was doing that it amazes me that I lasted.

That captures the point, I think. A certain kind of moral movie could be called "so good it's bad."

I'm not sure if Kael intended to contrast taking movies seriously with appreciating them as aesthetic objects. Can't we take seriously aesthetic objects, even if they don't have "messages" attached? It's also interesting to think about how the "independent" label has broadened since Kael said this. Certainly today, plenty of what are called independent films are aesthetically focused, rather than message films. I'm not sure this wasn't even the case when Kael wrote the above.

This post was started in 2008, I don't run around the 'net searching for reviews of bad old Mike Myers movies, but I did want to clean up some of the drafts still lingering on Blogger. Finishing up this post makes me miss my former coworker and friend CeOtis Robinson, who definitely would have loved discussing this question.

Essays About Latin

Professor Emeritus William Harris of Middlebury college has a great collection of essays on studying, translating and appreciating Latin.

How Many Roman Missals Do We Need?

Responding to a post on the NLM about Midwest Theological Forum's plans to publish an edition of the new English Missal, Fr. Franklyn McAfee commented:

I hope they also will do an edition of the Missale Romanum (1962).

This got me thinking. Between the Benzinger reprint from PCP and the Vatican edition we're pretty well situated for 1962 Missals at this point, if perhaps not so well situated that another edition wouldn't be a good thing.

And anyways, what's the harm in another edition? Actually, there is a downside: economies of scale.  The balance on the 1962 Missal might still tilt towards additional editions.  I'm not as convinced that we need as many editions of the new missal as have already been announced.

While I'm glad we have other art choices than those of the Liturgical Press edition, is the difference between the Midwest Theological Forum edition and the Magnificat edition going to be worth the increased price of both missals?

Now, is there anything we can do about this? Unless we're liturgical publishers, probably not. Centralized control probably wouldn't work any better. But liturgical publishers should try to make sure they're offering something different from what the competition is offering and not just multiplying their offerings uselessly and wasting everyone's money and time.  Newman House Press apparently has plans for a Latin/English Missale parvum, which sounds interesting.

Ollie's Noodle Shop &c.

I'd been jonesing for some roast pork and won-ton soup for a couple weeks. So I head over to Ollie's Noodle Shop near Lincoln Center.

The food was it's usual tasty, but not haute self. But I love the scenery of eating there, that is the other diners.  Most of the time, this is compounded by your being packed in nearly check to jowl with them.

On a previous trip, Skipp Sudduth (of Third Watch and who I saw in South Pacific) was at the next table.

Tonight, well it's hard to explain. I was sitting next to two teenage boys who were talking about (among other things):

• Whether they could whistle/raise one eyebrow/roll their tongues/and a long list of other "genetic abilities"
• Whether women could make them laugh (one said yes, the other said no)
• Why girls did or didn't like them
• How one guy's father always talked to him like he was the audience for his father's podcast!

Hmm, I'm not sure it comes across on the page. (The screen?) But it was all I could do to keep my head in my newspaper and not stare and laugh.

It's the first time I've been up here since the Lincoln Center Barnes and Noble closed.  R.I.P.  Also, the 7 o'clock showing of Of Gods and Men at the Lincoln Plaza Theatre was sold out an hour before showtime, which augers well for the prospects of the film.  America needs more monastic witness.

As I walked by the Mormon Temple up there, I peeked in the glass at the side of the doors.  I'd walked by before, but never thought to do that!  You could see the folks walking around inside in their all white temple garb.  The aforementioned Barnes and Noble had a huge section on Mormonism, which puzzled me until I spotted the (relatively understated) temple across the street.

Oh yeah, and the Apple Store architecture creeps me out.

The Big Fear

David has the Big Fear. It doesn’t take a cabdriver too long to realize that once you leave the joy of shape-up and start uptown on Hudson Street, you’re fair game. You’re at the mercy of the Fear Variables, which are (not necessarily in order): the traffic, which will be in your way; the other cabdrivers, who want to take your business; the police, who want to give you tickets; the people in your cab, lunatics who will peck you with nudges and dent you with knives; and your car, which is capable of killing you at any time. Throw in your bosses and the back inspectors and you begin to realize that a good night is not when you make a living wage. That’s a great night. A good night is when you survive to tell your stories at tomorrow’s shape-up. But all the Fear Variables are garbage compared with the Big Fear. The Big Fear is that times will get so hard that you’ll have to drive five or six nights a week instead of three. The Big Fear is that your play, the one that’s only one draft away from a possible show-case will stay in your drawer. The Big Fear is thinking about all the poor stiff civil servants who have been sorting letters at the post office every since the last Depression and all the great plays they could have produced. The Big Fear is that, after twenty years of schooling, they’ll put you on the day shift. The Big Fear is you’re becoming a cabdriver.

Mark Jacobson, New York Magazine, Sept. 22, 1975

Christmas Trees Still Selling

Obviously, it's a mistake to still have a big stock left over, but a Christmas tree seller in Queens discovered a new market for after December 25 (Gregorian), the Russian Orthodox!

The trees are still, slowly selling — Mr. Choi sold two on Wednesday to some customers who were Russian Orthodox and celebrating Christmas on Jan. 7. But really, Mr. Choi said he was trying to figure out how to dispose of them. He said he did not gauge the economy correctly and would be more careful next year.

Give 'Em The Pickle!

Starbucks is doing its job "giving the pickle" tonight. The guy ahead of me in line got a tall cappuccino with a cup of whipped cream on the side. Then when he got his drink he asked for whipped cream on top. They didn't charge him extra for any of it.

Mmmm... pickles and whipped cream.

Overheard

Earlier this week, when we had gotten the first snow of the year that "stuck," I heard a teen girl say to her friend, "I hate snow. It's so boring." Well, here in New York, where most people don't drive, it's probably true that the visual effect is more heightened and the excitement of trying to stay on the road is less critical.

Scene: a Deli in Jamaica, N.Y.

Interior, Night
Sam: Do you have toothbrushes.
Counterman: Yes.
puts hot pink toothbrush on counter
Sam: Do you perhaps have a different color
Counterman: Sure, how's this one.
puts yellow toothbrush on counter
Sam: Thanks, that's slightly more manly.
fade out

Why You Can't Wear Dress Boots

From Esquire:

Could you recommend some winter dress boots that are stylish and waterproof?

No, Jeremy, I will not recommend you a dress boot. Because you are not Errol Flynn and this is not the Spanish Main. What you need is a practical pair of rubber Wellingtons, which allow you to march to work through slush ponds without so much as breaking stride.

However, if you are friends with Errol Flynn, you can wear a monocle and roll your r's while singing Garry Owen.

Actually, They're Not In the Opera

The New York Times article on the opening night at La Scala featured this terrific picture of Italian police officers.  No, they're not in the opera, they're "[a] horse patrol facing hundreds of protesters in front of La Scala on Tuesday, opening night."  The cops over there certainly know how to dress. There were other officers on hand with more practical riot gear.

A Very New York Conversation

Buying pseudoephedrine at the drug store, the clerk asks not "Can I see your driver's license?" like they do most places, but "Can I see your state ID or driver's license?"

A Different Spin on "Keeping Christ in 'Christmas'"

The Christmas season is a great time to think about those who do not have Christ. As I've been decorating my tree and listening to Christmas music, I think of what a colossal letdown Christmas must be for those who don't have Christ as the center of their celebration.

I mean, how long can you sustain excitement about shopping, food, decorations, gifts and parties? Come January, all those things are gone, and in their place are bills, trash, gift receipts and a 5-10 pound weight gain.

Lisa Anderson writing in the Boundless Update from Focus on the Family