What We Have in Common With Pope Michael

We have discovered recently that we share something with Pope Michael of Kansas (note: not to be confused with Pope Michael I of Alexandria).  One of our recent blog posts recommended (/warned people away from) the web site Booksalefinder.com.  Indeed, Pope Michael agrees with our recommendation:

I recommend finding the library book sales in your area at book sale finder. [Link in the original --SJH] Book sales serve two purposes. Sometimes you find some good books. It is also a good recreation, and we all need to take a break from our work and rest. I also plan my longer trips by way of used book stores. Some thrift shops have proven quite useful.

We recommend, beloved sons, that you keep an eye out for the Pope Michael documentary due to be finished and released soon, it's the work of alumni of the Notre Dame film program.  We viewed the original short film with pleasure and look forward to the full length version.

A tip of the tiara to Three Double Swings for introducing us to the film about His Holiness.

Et tu, Jay?

The new New Criterion arrived in the mail yesterday. I turned first, as I often do to Jay Nordlinger's "New York Chronicle", a recounting of the musical goings-on for in the capital of the world since the last issue. I especially enjoy reading his New Criterion column since the passing of the late and lamented New York Sun, where he was a regular music critic.

I was merrily reading along and came to this:

Over the two nights, we learned once more that [the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam] is an ensemble of great value, an adornment to Holland itself. I had a jarring thought: How will the RCO fare under sharia?

Now, I admit that my first reaction was to laugh out loud. I expect this is the reaction the author expected from New Criterion readers and for which he hoped.

But, (you knew there was a but coming right?) Nordlinger is also the music critic I respect because he's written, "Music dwells in its own realm, unless it is freighted with words that constitute political baggage." And even closer to the bone, he said this an interview:

Sometimes performers inflict politics on the audience, and I of course take that into account when I write – but that happens seldom. I sort of pride myself on not letting political views color any of my music criticism – even in blatantly political works, like, oh, "The Death of Klinghoffer" (the opera by John Adams). There are certain musicians whose politics I despise, but I would never hold that against them, musically. (You would probably want an example – I'll give you Daniel Barenboim, whose views on the Middle East are roughly Arafat's.)

A group like the Kronos Quartet does frankly political things – commissions political works and so on. That you have to deal with.

But, in the main, I'm an art-for-art's-sake guy. (Which is a "conservative" position, incidentally.)

While Nordlinger's aside here isn't really about the music itself, it diverted me from the music which is really the topic of the article. Indeed, I turned back to the front and read this month's "Notes & Comments" column "Islam vs. Islamism" before turning back to Nordlinger.

This isn't, of course, the same as a musician commissioning a "political" work. More like a comment from the podium about how great Obama is while the stagehands reset for the next piece. And that wasn't quite what I was looking for in the "New York Chronicle" on the Ides of April.

The Silent Amen

A great comment from "matthewj" over at MusicaSacra.com:

...this is a personal pet peeve that I work on with my cantors and choir all the time: don't close the books the second the final note has been cut off! Give the hymn a second to sink in. Could you imagine if immediately after reading the last line of the Gospel the Deacon slammed shut the Gospel book as though he was so glad it was all over? Sing the final note, wait a moment, then quietly and discreetly close your book. If the hymn is really a prayer, you don't need to close it the second the prayer is done, as though you're terrified that more prayer might be waiting and ready to come out of that book. Take a moment, a silent Amen if you want to think of it that way, before going on your merry way.

The Times They Have A Changed

Worship at the Church of Our Saviour, where I go on Sundays, looks like this:

So I was amused to see this 1990 article from the New York Times:

The Church of Our Saviour is also presenting an unusual, fully costumed dance performance on Good Friday at 3 P.M. Joseph Alexander will perform Marcel Dupre's difficult organ setting of the Stations of the Cross, and members of the Players Project will perform the choreography created for the work by Anna Sokolow.

That would never fly these days! At three o'clock on Good Friday, we hold the Liturgy of the Lord's Passion. Our Stations are a bit after five and are traditional.

I'm glad I did it...

...but I won't do it again, well not in the same way anyways. After Church and brunch at Docks on Sunday, I walked part of the way home.  I walked up Second Avenue, turned east, checked out the Church of the Holy Family (not as ugly as I expected) and then headed up First Avenue.  Then I walked across the 59th Street Bridge. It's pretty ugly.  While I enjoyed walking across the Brooklyn Bridge last year, this bridge is not much fun at all.  The view is not as good as the view from the Brooklyn Bridge and you're on the lower deck and right next to loud traffic (bottom photo).  Even my good photo (top) was taken through a chain-link fence.  The trip also involved lots of worrying about whether bicycles would hit you or not since they rarely stayed in their lane.  Once I get to Queens, I hopped on the subway to ride the rest of the way home.  I've done two of the bridges now.  I'm thinking about trying to walk over all of the bridges between Manhattan and the rest of the city before the end of the summer.

Rambusch in 1942

In 1942, Popular Science Magazine published a neat article with many photographs showing the process for making stained glass at New York's Rambusch Company. The entire article is available on Google Books:

Catholic New York on Annunciation Mass

Catholic New York, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of New York has published a very nice article about the Feast of the Annunciation Solemn Mass for Life held at Holy Innocents and organized by our Knights of Columbus Council:

Cardinal Egan Presides at Latin Mass for Annunciation

By MARY ANN POUST

The traditional pageantry and sense of reverence that accompany the Latin Mass were on full display at Holy Innocents Church, during a Solemn Mass celebrating the feast of the Annunciation and the 15th anniversary of Pope John Paul II's encyclical "The Gospel of Life."

Cardinal Egan presided and preached at the March 25 Mass, saying in a homily that the occasion marked not just the Annunciation and the encyclical's anniversary, but also the fact that "we have brought ourselves together to celebrate Mass in the extraordinary form...with graciousness and devotion."(more)

This is a (low quality) image of the beautiful photo from the article which I took with my camera phone.

A Dangerous Web Site

Book Sale Finder lists book sales around the country. Just what your local used book addict doesn't need.

Housekeeping

So you may have noticed a trend, I'm trying to post every day. We'll see how long it lasts.

Meanwhile, I just noticed (Google Buzz actually was good for something!) that my friend Paul has got a newish blog going. It's called "Three Double Swings", which as a pretty darn good name. ("Sedes Sapientiae" was already taken; beggars can't be choosers.)

I'll put it up on the sidebar if I ever get around to updating it.

Stop Helping!

Marc Thiessen's latest in the Washington Post is titled, "Pope Benedict is not like Nixon". I know he's responding to Timothy Shriver, but sheesh! These are not the headlines (and I know it may have been written by a copy editor, not by Thiessen himself) we want to read from the defenders of the Pope.

No Horseradish Shortages

If you grow your own. Not something I'd ever even thought of, though it has to be grown somewhere.

This is awesome.

The Hartford Courant has provided a one-stop shop for Red Sox fans living in enemy territory. Their Rivalry Central blog reflects Hartford's divided loyalties and provides a run down on all the news of the day for both the good guys and the bad guys.

Graphic from here.

They don't make 'em like they used to.

An obit ran in the New York Times today for former Orioles pitcher Mike Cuellar. Obviously his career was before my time. This sentence impressed me:

Cuellar had a 24-8 record in 1970, when he led A.L. pitchers in victories, complete games (21) and winning percentage (.750) and pitched the Orioles to a World Series championship with a Game 5 victory against the Cincinnati Reds.

It's that bolded part that caught my eye. Nowadays, that's unheard of. Wikipedia says the last pitcher to pitch 20 complete games in a season was Fernando Valenzuela in 1986. Of course, it's nowhere near the top-100 list for complete games in a single season, but the latest season on that list is 1892 and to break into it, you'd have to pitch 51 games in a single season.

Transit Trouble

New Yorkers love to argue about transit. They love to argue about what's the best way to get from point A to point B. Should you take the F or the 7, the 1 or the A. Folks who don't own cars will debate the pluses and minuses of the various highways and expressways in the City.

Hilariously tonight as I was coming home, I saw two people actually get into a shoving match on the street over what train line to take and where to transfer to get to their destination.

Maugham on Beauty

From Somerset Maugham's novel Cakes and Ale:

I do not know if others are like myself, but I am conscious that I cannot contemplate beauty long. For me no poet made a falser start than Keats when he wrote the first line of Endymion. When the thing of beauty has given me the magic of its sensation my mind quickly wanders; I listen with incredulity to the persons who tell me that they can look with rapture for hours at a view or a picture. Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. It is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all: that is why the criticism of art, except in so far as it is unconcerned with beauty and therefore with art, is tiresome. All the critic can tell you with regard to Titian's Entombment of Christ, perhaps of all the pictures in the world that which has most pure beauty, is to go and look at it. What else he has to say is history, or biography, or what not. But people add other qualities to beauty—sublimity, human interest, tenderness, love—because beauty does not long content them. Beauty is perfect, and perfection (such is human nature) holds our attention but for a little while. The mathematician who after seeing Phèdre asked: "Qu'est-ce que ça prouve?" was not such a fool as he has been generally made out. No one has ever been able to explain why the Doric temple of Pæstum is more beautiful than a glass of cold beer except by bringing in considerations that have nothing to do with beauty. Beauty is a blind alley. It is a mountain peak which once reached leads nowhere. That is why in the end we find more to entrance us in El Greco than in Titian, in the incomplete achievement of Shakespeare than in the consummate success of Racine. Too much has been written about beauty. That is why I have written a little more. Beauty is that which satisfies the æsthetic instinct. But who wants to be satisfied? It is only to the dullard that enough is as good as a feast. Let us face it: beauty is a bit of a bore. (pp. 139-141)

Some Solzhenitsyn

Also from The First Circle:

Rubin could not and never did listen for long. His idea of conversation (and this was how it usually went) was to strew before his friends the intellectual booty captured by his mind. As usual, he was eager to interrupt, but Nerzhin gripped the front of his overalls with five fingers and shook him to prevent him from speaking.

(p. 39)

Arguably...

Bill Simmons writes on Espn.com:

Q: Today is Saturday, aka College Football Day. I am pretty sure I have heard the word "arguably" said at least 15 times on the studio show I am watching. By them saying "Florida is ARGUABLY the best team in college football," are they actually making an argument?
-- Josh, Wilmington, Del.

SG: This is the cousin of the "having said that" argument Seinfeld and Larry David had on the "Curb Your Enthusiasm" season finale. Either you think Florida is the best team in college football or you don't. By declaring the Gators are "arguably" the best, all you're really saying is that someone could argue they are the best -- which makes no sense, because anyone could argue anything and that doesn't have to mean it's true. If I said Dirk Nowitzki was "arguably" washed up, you would argue, "Wait a second -- he's been great this year; that's the dumbest thing you've ever said." And we would be arguing. In other words, you just proved my point. So "arguably" is a word that means nothing other than, "I don't really believe this, but I'm throwing it out anyway."

These Shoes Are Awesome

I love Harris Tweed. People complain about our offices being too cold in the winter. I'm kind of hoping they're as cold as people say so I can break out the tweed jacket.

But here's an alternative for folks with hotter offices: Harris Tweed sneakers from Converse.



hat (shoe?) tip

This Is Not a Good Idea

Reuters reports that the Colonel of the Papal Swiss Guard floated the idea of letting women be guardsmen:

After more than five centuries protecting popes, the Swiss Guard may consider opening the ranks of the world's smallest army to women, its commander said Tuesday.

"I can imagine them for one role or another. Certainly we can think about this," Daniel Anrig, who took over the post late last year, told Italian television program "Studio Aperto."

Not to go all Bishop Williamson on him, but if the Vatican military starts signing up women we will know the idea of the complementarity of the sexes is close to being completely dead.

The Swiss Guard is an actual bodyguard, though you wouldn't know that from the article:

Clad in flamboyant striped uniforms, the guard's role is largely ceremonial and many of its members still carry around a medieval weapon -- the halberd, which is a combination of spear and battle axe.

They wear natty uniforms, but they're fully trained Swiss soldiers who then receive additional training when they arrive at the Vatican. Sure they look smart standing post at the Vatican, but that doesn't mean they're not actually guarding the place. The Pope isn't safe, remember Mehmet Ali Ağca? They're not qualifying on the SIG SG 550 just for the fun of it. The Guard's protective detail role also often gets missed, because they do it in mufti, not in the brightly colored uniforms.



Amazingly, the Swiss Guard has an online store. You can get Swiss Guard Swiss Army Knives and Swiss Guard Swiss Watches (sadly no Chocolate or Cuckoo Clocks.)

Morion tip to Fallen Sparrow

Defiance

Defiance, with actor Daniel Craig playing the leader of a band of Jewish partisans during the Second World War, was a pretty darn good movie. I went to see it in Times Square the weekend it came out. The film really got the crowd in the theater riled up. Lots of New York City Jews and descendants of Jews were there.

There was an incredible (in the unbelievable sense) comment on the movie in the New York Times. Jacob Heilbrunn writes that recent books have "exploited" the Holocaust and films have "infantalize[d]" it. Clearly it's true that falsified memoirs do exploit the Holocaust. But I think Heilbrunn is mistaken in what he writes about Defiance:

By choosing Daniel Craig to play the Jewish partisan commander Tuvia Bielski, complete with white horse, Mr. Zwick turns resistance to the Nazis into an action film, an emotionally glorious moment. As rousing as this vision of Jewish combat may be, it does raise a problem identified by the historian Raul Hilberg in his memoir “The Politics of Memory.”

According to Mr. Hilberg, “when relatively isolated or episodic acts of resistance are represented as typical, a basic characteristic of the German measures is obscured ... the drastic actuality of a relentless killing of men, women and children is mentally transformed into a more familiar picture of a struggle — however unequal — between combatants.”

There's plenty of clarity in the film about the brutality of the Nazi regime and the uneveness of the forces. That knowledge is what makes the movie exciting. But there's a more mistaken notion here. A piece of media doesn't need to tell us everything that is the case. It's just responsible for communicating one story. Indeed, no movie could tell the whole story of the Holocaust with justice. To fault one for not doing so is mistaken.

Now let me add a sketchy theoretical postscript. There's some sort of modern notion at play here: the idea of telling the whole story in one gulp, the idea of the objective unbiased observer (or newspaper, etc.). Indeed, the hope of a complete human understanding of the world without mystery or occlusion. A forgetting that for now "we see through a glass, darkly".

I'm close to just in time to make this less than a month between posts, however, the topic is an older one, but I wanted to get the newspaper clipping off my desk.