Trappist Photos

eBay seller "shadesofgrey*" has posted two auctions for a total of three photos of monks at the Trappist New Melleray Abbey in Iowa.  The photos were taken by Russell Trall Neville of Kewanee, Illinois.  Neville, an attorney, was also a pioneering cave explorer and photographer.

The first auction is for this photo:

Click here for a (much!) larger view. The accompanying caption reads:

The Prior, second in authority in the Trappist Monastery, New Melleray, Poesta, Iowa, here presents two novitiates to the Abbot during the Solemn Profession service. The Prior commends them to the abbot and petitions him to permit them to make their solemn profession, which consists of assuming the final vow of the Order. This is one of the series of photographs, the only ones ever taken in a Trappist Monastery during a service of this character.

The second auction is for two Trappist funeral photos.  The first, taken during the vigil in the church, is captioned, "Brother Eugene, Sup-Prior, the third in authority ... during funeral services for a departed brother. The deceased is in his habit and will be buried without a coffin."  The second is taken in the grave yard.  Since the deceased brother is visible in the photos, I've put them below the cut.

Two Bits From Poetry

The July/August 2012 number of Poetry has recently arrived in the mail.  This bit, the beginning of an essay by Robyn Schiff, may not be the best thing in the magazine this time 'round, but it's sure to please the Whappingites:

It's 7:08 AM and I just watched the "cold open" of yesterday's episode of Days of Our Lives online. The episode has been loosened from its forty-seven-year-old programmed slot by what the television industry calls "time shifting." Every age gets the science fiction it deserves. There's a tight one-beat shot of a sealed manila envelope. It has an anachronistic black wax stamp. Standard-issue inter-office mustard against the jet of the wax makes for a disorienting prop, giving the apparent secret concealed within the impression of having been documented by a hooded procurement specialist sent from the Renaissance to buy envelopes at Office Depot.

The essay, titled "Hell Mouth" is not yet available on the web, but I imagine it will be soon.

Second, a May 31 blog post by Lindsay Garbutt, the magazine's editorial assistant, calls our attention back to the fabulous May 1932 "Southern Number" of Poetry. It was edited by Allen Tate and is available in full on the Poetry Foundation web site.

Paris Review Interview: Evelyn Waugh

I've been reading some of the archived Paris Review interviews on their web site.  I've been focused mostly on the Art of Poetry ones, but this one from the Art of Fiction, with Evelyn Waugh, also caught my eye.

Pretty much the whole thing is great, but there are two parts I want to highlight here. First Waugh talks about politics and art or, more specifically, why the artist is, he thinks a reactionary:

INTERVIEWER

Do you think it just to describe you as a reactionary?

WAUGH

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along; he must offer some little opposition. Even the great Victorian artists were all anti-Victorian, despite the pressures to conform.

INTERVIEWER

But what about Dickens? Although he preached social reform he also sought a public image.

WAUGH

Oh, that's quite different. He liked adulation and he liked showing off. But he was still deeply antagonistic to Victorianism.

Secondly, Waugh had something to say about a question in the philosophy of mind that a friend and I have been batting around. Waugh claims to think in words instead of images or concepts:

INTERVIEWER

I gather from what you said earlier that you don't find the act of writing difficult.

WAUGH

I don't find it easy. You see, there are always words going round in my head: Some people think in pictures, some in ideas. I think entirely in words. By the time I come to stick my pen in my inkpot these words have reached a stage of order which is fairly presentable.

INTERVIEWER

Perhaps that explains why Gilbert Pinfold was haunted by voices—by disembodied words.

WAUGH

Yes, that's true—the word made manifest.

The interview doesn't develop the topic beyond that... but there it is.

Brooklyn Ecumenism

The New York City Council is considering a plan to "Legalize Brunch," that is to allow sidewalk cafe service before noon on Sundays. This is currently forbidden by an obscure city rule.

I've often said (though I probably wasn't the first) that Catholicism and Brunch are New York City's largest religions. That makes Msgr. Joseph Calise, pastor of the Shrine of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Brooklyn one of the city's leaders in ecumenical dialogue:

"'There'd really be no reason not to support them as long as they're not blocking free passage of anybody else.'

"Anyway, he said, church and brunch can co-exist.

"'If someone comes to an 8 a.m. Mass here, they go to a 10 o'clock brunch, it's not an either/or proposition,' he said."

Kids Draw the News

The New York Times is running a new feature that is genius in its simplicity and old school community newspaper style good fun.  "Kids Draw The News" is what it says on the tin.  Hysterically, they started with the story of the recent New York Athletic Club brawl.

Leaving the Seashore

I've finally finished reading The House By the Sea, which I previously mentioned here. Here's another quote for the commonplace book:

For I was writing poems and I knew that in doing that I was serving something greater than myself, or at least other than myself. One does not "find oneself" by pursuing one's self, but on the contrary by pursuing something else and learning through some discipline or routine (even the routine of making beds) who one is and wants to be.

2012... Anniversary / Resolution

Jay Nordlinger likes to point out that orchestral programmers are fond of anniversaries.

Why all this Mahler-ing? This year marks 150 years since his birth, and next year marks 100 years since his death. You get the impression that, without anniversaries, concert programmers would be paralyzed.

This year is the 200th anniversary of Napoleon's invasion of Russia, so I expect we'll be hearing a lot of Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture".




It's a good year to be in the cannon rental business too.

I'm thinking of celebrating by finally reading War and Peace. Most likely in the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation (fêted in the New Criterion by Eric Ormsby.)

If you'd like something a little shorter than War and Peace, you can celebrate the anniversary by reading this comic strip by Kate Beaton about the fine French cuisine provided to the French Army as it marched on Moscow.

Cassian in the New York Times

John Plotz brings the truly great books to the pages of the NY Times Book Review:

If the diagnoses in medieval texts were so psychologically acute, it’s very likely because the most ferocious accusers and denouncers were themselves acedia sufferers. Today, too, it takes an acediac to know acedia. When I read Cassian on “disgust with the cell,” I look around my own office and sigh deeply; and I greet like an old friend the monk whose gaze “rests obsessively on the window” while “with his fantasy he imagines the image of someone who comes to visit him.” Cassian’s description of acedia as mental drift, meanwhile, perfectly encapsulates the pointless and random detours that stop me from bearing down on a particular page: “The mind is constantly whirling from psalm to psalm, . . . tossed about fickle and aimless through the whole body of Scripture.”

Of course, the desert monks were emphatically not us. Stripping their lives down to the bare bones, they sought the divine and fought the demonic alone. What could be more different from us, tap-tapping away with social media always at hand? They gazed upward toward God; we shoot sideways glances at one another while trying to resist the allure of e-mail (nowadays, you can “desert your cell” without shifting from your chair). Still, “excesses meet,” and now that solitary unstructured brainwork has returned with a vengeance, we may be suffering an epidemic of early medieval acedia. Is there anything we can learn from the monks and nuns who came before us?

Let the Marsupial Madness Begin

After this photo of Yo-Yo Ma communing with a wombat blew up on Twitter, Lang Lang is surely trying to get his hands on a kangaroo.

In Memoriam, [Ring out, wild bells]

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
   The flying cloud, the frosty light:
   The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
   Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
   The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind
   For those that here we see no more;
   Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
   And ancient forms of party strife;
   Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
   The faithless coldness of the times;
   Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
   The civic slander and the spite;
   Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
   Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
   Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
   The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
   Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

by Lord Alfred Tennyson

Robert's Rules

"Thank you," Anselmo said to her and Robert Jordan realized suddenly that he and the girl were not alone and he realized too that it was hard for him to look at her because it made his voice change so. He was violating the second rule of the two rules for getting on well with people that speak Spanish; give the mean tobacco and leave the women alone; and he realized, very suddenly, that he did not care/ There were so many things that he had not to care about, why should he care about that?

Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

No, Really, Just No

Netflix e-mailed me today to say, "Now is a great time to come back to Netflix." But really, no, just no. We're coming up on new year's resolution time and unlimited streaming Netflix is not the way to meet my "be more productive" goal.

Fun?

Book Culture's e-mail newsletter says:

Fun Fact: On this day in 1970, prominent Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima committed ritualistic suicide (seppuku) after taking part in an unsuccessful coup.

Seamus Heaney at the 92nd St. Y

I was at this wonderful reading earlier this fall:

Legio Patria Nostra

Helen Rittelmeyer writes:

H. W. Crocker III declares the French Foreign Legion one of the ten best thing about Catholicism: “It seems to me that as the product of a Catholic culture, showcasing a Catholic militarism by accepting men of all nations and backgrounds, devoted to one common goal, and by bestowing a sort of secular forgiveness of sins via its traditional offer of anonymity for recruits, it is a good reflection of the Catholic spirit.”

Here's the Choir of the French Foreign Legion singing one of their traditional songs, "Ich hatt einen Kameraden":

Another Bit from the LRB

Another bit from the current (Nov. 3) London Review of Books. This from an essay by James Meek:

"The lightness of the ebook medium, literally and figuratively, holds a terrible allure and an insidious threat to the heavily booked-up among us. How many marriages, seemingly held firm by the impossibility of moving several hundredweight of vinyl or CDs out of a family-sized home, have already foundered post the digitisation of music? How many more will break if apparently inseparable and immovable matrimonial libraries become something that anyone can walk out with in their pocket?"

Materialism: Then and Now

Mary-Kay Wilmers reviewing Joan Didion's new book Blue Nights in the London Review of Books:

"Three months later he rang Didion and her husband to say he’d just delivered ‘a beautiful baby girl’ to a mother who was unable to keep her: were they interested? After they’d been to the hospital and looked at the baby and made up their minds to have her they called on Dunne’s brother and his wife in Beverly Hills for a celebratory drink (‘only when I read my early fiction, in which someone was always downstairs making a drink and singing “Big noise blew in from Winnetka”, did I realise how much we all drank and how little thought we gave to it’). Lenny, Didion’s sister-in-law, offered to meet her at Saks the next morning to buy a layette (in the 1960s people still talked about ‘layettes’); if she spent 80 dollars Saks would throw in a cot – a ‘bassinette’.

I took the glass and put it down.

I had not considered the need for a bassinette.

I had not considered the need for a layette.

It’s hard to imagine that happening now, when having a baby and having the stuff seem to be inseparable parts of the same enterprise.

For the IMLDB

Another entry for the IMLDB, the Internet Movie Liturgical Database (like the IMFDB mutatis mutandis).  In the 2nd episode of the new TV series Pan Am, from which this screenshot is taken, this is a Catholic Church in 1963 in Paris, France:

Which it's obviously not, but actually Riverside Church in New York City.  They haven't even bothered to dress it to look like a Catholic Church in 1963 (6 candles, sanctuary gates, tabernacle for starters).

Addendum: in the a street scene set in NYC in the first episode, I spotted a Muni Meter, first installed in 1999.

Homer Nods

The New Yorker is famous for its fact checking "et idem indignor quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus."  Here's Rebecca Mead writing about Daphne Guinness (subscription only) in the September 26, 2011 New Yorker (my emphasis)

[Guinness] often wears a veil: "What's great is tying a bit of net around your face, and everything looks like it's in Super 8. It gives a bit of grain to the world." Even before J.K. Rowling came up with the idea, Guinness dreamed of wearing a cloak that would render her invisible.

What? Anyone over 25 with a bit of D&D in their misspent youth—or anyone who's read some Tolkien—knows that J.K. Rowling didn't invent the cloak of invisibility. Here's a version from Emily Watson's book Fairies of Our Garden

This book was published in 1867.  That's a few years before Rowling could have "c[o]me up with the idea."

There Is No Mafia

The New York Post reports on some religion news:

“Family” health coverage has proven pretty pricey for one high-level mobster.

The third-ranking member of the Colombo crime family is facing an 18-to-24-month prison stint after pleading guilty yesterday to a shakedown scheme designed to cover another mobster’s medical bills after a stabbing.

Richard Fusco, 75, admitted that he joined in a health-care reform “sit-down” of Colombo leaders.

At the meeting -- which was secretly taped by a mob turncoat -- it was agreed that the Gambino crime family would pay the injured mobster’s bills because a Gambino had done the stabbing.

Most of the $150,000 tab was to come from the Gambinos’ illegally skimmed cut of proceeds from the annual Figli di Santa Rosalia celebration on 18th Avenue in Brooklyn, federal prosecutors said.
...

One of the indictments that led to the arrest of more than 120 alleged NY and NJ mobsters last January has more details on the alleged mob involvement.

81. It was a part of the scheme that, on or about May 27, 2010, a “Preliminary Income Summary Statement” was submitted on behalf of the Figli di Santa Rosalia, in which the defendant ANGELO SPATA falsely stated that the estimated gross income from vendors’ fees at the 2010 Feast of Santa Rosalia (“Gross Income”) was $51,000, and thus the estimated payment to the City of New York, at 20 percent of the Gross Income, was $10,200, significantly understating the estimated gross income and the estimated payment due. It was a further part of the scheme that following the 2010 Feast of Santa Rosalia, a “Final Income Summary Sheet” was submitted on behalf of Figli di Santa Rosalia, in which a conspirator falsely stated that the Gross Income was $43,000 and the total payment to the City of New York was $8,600, significantly understating the actual Gross Income and the total payment due.

The annual festival didn't happen this year.