quotidian quintilian

At the Fishhouses

2008-02-08T22:14:00.000-08:00

Although it is a cold evening,
down by one of the fishhouses
an old man sits netting,
his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,
a dark purple-brown,
and his shuttle worn and polished.
The air smells so strong of codfish
it makes one's nose run and one's eyes water.
The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs
and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up
to storerooms in the gables
for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on.
All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,
swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,
is opaque, but the silver of the benches,
the lobster pots, and masts, scattered
among the wild jagged rocks,
is of an apparent translucence
like the small old buildings with an emerald moss
growing on their shoreward walls.
The big fish tubs are completely lined
with layers of beautiful herring scales
and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered
with creamy iridescent coats of mail,
with small iridescent flies crawling on them.
Up on the little slope behind the houses,
set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass,
is an ancient wooden capstan,
cracked, with two long bleached handles
and some melancholy stains, like dried blood,
where the ironwork has rusted.
The old man accepts a Lucky Strike.
He was a friend of my grandfather.
We talk of the decline in the population
and of codfish and herring
while he waits for a herring boat to come in.
There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb.
He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty,
from unnumbered fish with that black old knife,
the blade of which is almost worn away.

Down at the water's edge, at the place
where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp
descending into the water, thin silver
tree trunks are laid horizontally
across the gray stones, down and down
at intervals of four or five feet.

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals . . . One seal particularly
I have seen here evening after evening.
He was curious about me. He was interested in music;
like me a believer in total immersion,
so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.
I also sang "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God."
He stood up in the water and regarded me
steadily, moving his head a little.
Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge
almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug
as if it were against his better judgment.
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
the clear gray icy water . . . Back, behind us,
the dignified tall firs begin.
Bluish, associating with their shadows,
a million Christmas trees stand
waiting for Christmas. The water seems suspended
above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones.
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

~ Elizabeth Bishop

DGP

2007-05-18T10:52:00.000-07:00

St. Edmund Campion

2006-12-01T10:54:00.000-08:00

Edmund was born in London, the son of a bookseller. He was raised a Catholic, given a scholarship to St. John's College, Oxford, when fifteen, and became a fellow when only seventeen. His brilliance attracted the attention of such leading personages as the Earl of Leicester, Robert Cecil, and even Queen Elizabeth. He took the Oath of Supremacy acknowledging Elizabeth head of the church in England and became an Anglican deacon in 1564. Doubts about Protestanism increasingly beset him, and in 1569 he went to Ireland where further study convinced him he had been in error, and he returned to Catholicism. Forced to flee the persecution unleashed on Catholics by the excommunication of Elizabeth by Pope Pius V, he went to Douai, France, where he studied theology, joined the Jesuits, and then went to Brno, Bohemia, the following year for his novitiate. He taught at the college of Prague and in 1578 was ordained there. He and Father Robert Persons were the first Jesuits chosen for the English mission and were sent to England in 1580. His activities among the Catholics, the distribution of his Decem rationes at the University Church in Oxford, and the premature publication of his famous Brag (which he had written to present his case if he was captured) made him the object of one of the most intensive manhunts in English history. He was betrayed at Lyford, near Oxford, imprisoned in the Tower of London, and when he refused to apostatize when offered rich inducements to do so, was tortured and then hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn on December 1 on the technical charge of treason, but in reality because of his priesthood. He was canonized by Pope Paul VI in 1970 as one of the forty English and Welsh Martyrs.

The Cynic Librarian

2006-11-30T23:58:00.000-08:00

has the first edition of the Kierkegaard Carnival up at his site, which you can find by clicking on the title link above. Who knows where it all leads? Many thanks to those who took part, and to the Cynic Librarian for putting it all together.

Artifakt

2006-11-30T00:58:00.000-08:00

December, 1 2006 at Shallots Bar and Bistro
2525 fourth ave, belltown, seattle, Washington 98101
No cover!

"Weather Underground and Onset Art presents:

Going into our third “ARTIFAKT” art show we will be showcasing even more genres of art and as you can see there will be a lot more artists. We will be showing everything from photography to abstract to urban. For those that were down at the last two shows you know the vibe was thick and the art was good. Every show is better than the last.For those that didn't get a chance to come down - check us out you won't be disappointed. Most if not all art will be for sale... The venue can easily hold 250+ people and has hundreds of feet of wall space with 30+ feet tall walls. We are going to be bringing in A LOT of art work so come down and check it out... This will make for the PERFECT pre-funk to any Friday night activities you might have!! PLUS FREE PASSES TO BODYROCK ($10 Value) @ Element -332 5th Ave North"

Notes On Fassbinder's The Third Generation

2006-11-29T00:01:00.000-08:00

Somehow I missed this when it first came out on DVD in July. How could this happen, since I check the Fassbinder section every time I walk into Scarecrow? I'll preface my very few remarks by referring to Jim Clark's review, which, as usual, is amazingly thorough. I'm not sure what this guy's day job is, but he sure has done some great work writing about movies in his spare time. I enjoyed reading his commentary on the movie more than I enjoyed watching the movie itself, which probably means I should go back and watch it again. Before I do, here are my first impressions.

There is Fassbinder's stated aim, which I'd read before but here quote from Jim:

When an interviewer asked Fassbinder about the storyline, his response was surprising: "On the one hand an industrialist [Lurz], on the other a policeman [Inspector Gast]. Together they decide to form a terrorist cell, the first man because it'll be useful for his business ventures, the second to justify his repressive activities. [The thesis is] very simple: nowadays it's capitalism that brings forth terrorism, to boost itself and strengthen its system of hegemony."

Perhaps I'm thinking too much of the terrorism of today, and I don't know much more about terrorism in Germany after WWII except what I've read in Jim's review, but Fassbinder's idea seems to me patently absurd. It's simple, it might be dramatically compelling, and it has a touch of that whole snake-swallowing-its-own-tail thing, but I think it's a bit much for anyone besides the biggest bug-eyed conspiracy theorist to swallow. Which isn't to say that there isn't plenty of corruption in corporate offices and police departments, or that examples can't be found of collaboration between the two. But to expand this to a generalized observation that "nowadays it's capitalism that brings forth terrorism, to boost itself and strengthen its system of hegemony" is pretty far fetched.

Unless I'm mistaken, this is all the further fetched given Jim's description of the terrorist event referred to by Fassbinder in the title sequence: the RAF's (Rote Armee Fraktion) kidnapping and murder of wealthy industrialist and former Nazi Hanns Martin Schleyer. Another account of these events can be found here. Even if Schleyer were an evil capitalist, let alone a Nazi, no one claims that he engineered his own kidnapping and murder. Very generally speaking, I think an argument can be made for a kind of interdependence between leftist and rightward politics, or that some form of capitalism may lead to totalitarianism through the machinations of a cravenly opportunistic legal community. But something that too few people understand is that the Nazis were National Socialists, which is to say that for all their fetishes for guns and leather, they were left wing. And if there is some connection to be made between Schleyer and the Lurz character's involvement with the terrorist goons in the movie it's that they were all leftist, whether they alligned themselves with Nazi or Communist ideology.

Much of the film verges on chaos. Perhaps this is part of Fassbinder's strategy. Chaos, moral and political and whatever other form you please, is certainly a subject played up in the movie, but there's no question that some of it is the result of the amazing speed at which Fassbinder, Inc. worked. Sure, I'd rather watch Third Generation than just about anything playing at the multplexes these days, but it isn't a masterpiece by Fassbinder's standards, most of which were produced at an equally hectic pace, The layered aural experience that was so interesting in 13 Moons is so constant here that it seems more like undifferentiated noise. Which may have been the intention, but it doesn't make for a compelling movie. It suppose it's interesting to write (and read) about in retrospect (pace Mr. Clark), but that doesn't mean it's fun to hear. One exception: Peer Raben's electronic music, as it was in 13 Moons, is weirdly enjoyable, and perhaps even matches the material better than it did in 13 Moons.

Visually, there is some amazing photography here, and Jim breaks a number of shots down very well indeed. But much of the picture seemed to me uneven. There are the mirrors, the cramped spaces, the views from and of skyscrapers. But there are also angles from above and below that seem out of place, even when they're striking. One example would be the view from the upper floor in the Gast home, another would be Paul photographed from below. The sequence of von Stein cutting a hole through a paper wall in a Japanese restaurant and remaining unnoticed was tough to swallow, and two of the violent death scenes are pretty implausable. Maybe not as implausable as von Trotta's suicide in The American Soldier, but that was the most ridiculous death scene in the history of the dramatic arts. Of course, I hardly know how I'd react while being riddled with bullets in the middle of eating a California roll, laying flowers on the grave of my beloved, or stabbing myself in the gut - but still.

I'm still trying to make up my mind about other aspects of the film. The characters Petra (Margit Carstensen) and Hilde (Bulle Ogier) are shown flirting near the beginning of the movie, but not much comes of it after that. Hilde comically becomes domesticated in short order by the head terrorist, Paul (Raúl Gimenez), while Petra leaves her husband for reasons that seem pretty dubious. Is anything to be made of this? Or should we just accept that life gets pretty weird sometimes, and often seems cruelly ironic. Well, maybe that is enough. What about Lilo Pompeit's character? Made up like a doll ... perhaps she's a puppet of Inspector Gast. And how does Susanne come to have an affair with her father-in-law? What are we to make of the connection between Volker Spengler's character and Lurz? How does von Stein manage to catch on to what's really going on? Does his infatuation with Bakunin mark him as a hero, or an idealistic idiot, or both? It's a tangled web he weaves, but maybe it's just enough to show how everybody in this terrorist cell is utterly clueless and dysfunctional. Well, not quite dysfunctional - they did manage to kill some people.

The viciousness and cruelty of terrorism is pretty easy to see - just turn on the news, and many characters in The Third Generatiion are shown doing just that. And as Mr. Clark writes, Volker Schlöndorff had already made The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum from Heinrich Böll's recent novel (Walker Percy alert: Böll was a one of his favorite German authors, along with Peter Handke), which gave us a psychological portrait of a young woman caught up in events in a way that's hard to determine her culpability, if not her boyfriend's. So why not make a movie about what complete idiots terrorists are? They have know idea what they're talking about when they mindlessly quote Schopenhauer, nor are they aware that they really are clowns, even when they dress up as clowns for the kidnapping. Complete, utter fools. Which German terrorists in the 1970's may well have been. And perhaps all terrorists are, in a way that goes beyond the tired description of "darkly comic".

But they weren't just fools. Nor are the terrorists of today. It's true that there's something vaguely comical about the ineptitude of Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, but that's only because he was inept and his attempt to bring down an airliner was itself brought down by a stewardess or two (sorry, flight attendant). Is there something funny about Mohammed Atta? Somehow that doesn't compute.

There's an awful lot of quotation going on in this movie. Graffiti on bathroom stalls is quoted at the beginning of each section. The terrorists spout Schopenhauer. Fassbinder quotes Chancellor Schmidt. The terrorists play keep-away with a book by Mikhail Bakunin, reading from it each time they go to make the next toss. Here are some Bakunin quotes, supplied by Jim: "I am truly free only when all human beings, men and women, are equally free. The freedom of other men, far from negating or limiting my freedom, is, on the contrary, its necessary premise and confirmation." Well, okay. And then "the idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind." Well, as an enemy of Marx perhaps he ought to be a friend, but is he? Bakunin works in this movie a little like Artaud worked in Satan's Brew. Maybe I should write "is worked", and maybe not quite as well. It occurs to me that Fassbinder was full of a lot of other people's ideas, and perhaps he is making the cinematic equivalent of a "novel of ideas". Which may be why it's more fun to read and write about this movie than to watch it. At least the first time.

Blaise Says

2006-11-28T10:32:00.000-08:00

It is not good to be too free. It is not good to have everything one wants.

How You Found Quotidian Quintilian XVII

2006-11-28T10:26:00.000-08:00

71.206.51, roughly in the vicinity of St. Louis Missouri, is evidently gathering bloggers' opinions on Ronald Dworkin's Artificial Happiness. He found mine in yesterday's bit on Oliver's article in the New Atlantis. Although it seems he took zero intersest, as he bounced out of here after less than a second. Which seems to be the general pattern here.

Jeffrey Oliver on The Myth of Thomas Szasz

2006-11-27T13:21:00.000-08:00

This is a very fine article in The New Atlantis on the too little-known renegade psychiatrist who has inveighed against the excesses of the therapeutic culture for the last 40 years. He's generally thought to have turned into a crank a long time ago, but maybe that's better than being a quack. Richard John Neuhaus' bit in First Things includes a nice summary, in addition to a few other interesting items. A quotation from the quotation:

For Szasz, the extreme induced by his war against psychiatry was both equal and opposite to that of his profession. When psychiatry failed to shut Szasz up, it went about forgetting him. When Szasz failed to persuade his peers, he seemed to devote his career to enraging them. In 1963, shortly after the crisis at SUNY, Szasz wrote: ‘To maintain that a social institution suffers from certain “abuses” is to imply that it has certain other desirable or good uses. . . . My thesis is quite different: Simply put, it is that there are, and can be, no abuses of Institutional Psychiatry, because Institutional Psychiatry is, itself, an abuse.’ By the 1970s he was comparing psychiatrists to witch hunters. By the 1980s it was slave owners and Nazis. While such extreme rhetoric made Szasz a public figure for a while, his polemical excess eventually ensured his professional obscurity.

“Yet we are also right to give the earlier Szasz his due. ‘Quite probably,’ wrote Edwin Schur in The Atlantic Monthly in the 1960s, ‘he has done more than any other man to alert the American public to the potential dangers of an excessively psychiatrized society.’ . . . Perhaps the most remarkable tribute, however, came in 1989, when an ailing Karl Menninger, the long-time patriarch of American psychiatry, wrote Szasz the following:

“I am holding your new book, Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences, in my hands. I read part of it yesterday and I have also read reviews of it. I think I know what it says but I did enjoy hearing it said again. I think I understand better what has disturbed you these years and, in fact, it disturbs me, too, now. We don’t like the situation that prevails whereby a fellow human being is put aside, outcast as it were, ignored, labeled and said to be “sick in his mind.” . . .

Today, Szasz lives alone in a suburb of Syracuse where he continues to write. He has already published one new book this year—“My Madness Saved Me”: The Madness and Marriage of Virginia Woolf—and he recently finished a draft of yet another critical history of his profession. If the trend continues, the books will be read by few and endorsed by almost none. After forty years of comparing psychiatrists to the scum of the earth, Szasz now stands as one of the biggest obstacles to his own ideas. It is simply too easy to dismiss him as an axe-grinding zealot, a ‘musician who does not like music,’ as one critic put it. ‘The atheist who cannot stop speaking about God.’ But perhaps a new generation of critics will arise—aware of psychiatry’s achievements but also its limits, leading us not to extremes but to a much-needed reformation of psychiatry from within, and a much-needed de-medicalization of human life in the culture as a whole.

The entire article by Oliver is well worth reading, and on the whole I think his take on the way our society views mental illness is more balanced than that of Dworkin's Artificial Happiness, which I was reading and excerpting here and there and a few weeks ago.

From Violence and the Sacred

2006-11-26T17:52:00.000-08:00

Girard closes Chapter One with comments on the efforts of religious thinkers to witness to evil. I don't have much in the way of questions about this, but it's a great conclusion well worth quoting.

Even the wildest aberrations of religious thought still manage to bear witness to the fact that evil and the violent measures taken to combat evil are essentially the same. At times violence appears to man in its most terrifying aspect, wantonly sowing chaos and destruction; at other times it appears in the guise of the peacemaker, graciously distributing the fruits of sacrifice.

The secret of the dual nature of violence still eludes men. Beneficial violence must be carefully distinguished from harmful violence, and the former contunually promoted at the expense of the latter. Ritual is nothing more than the regular exercise of "good" violence. As we have remarked, if sacrifcial violence is to be effective it must resemble the nonsacrificial variety as closely as possible. That is why some rites may seem to us nothing more than senseless inversions of prohibited acts. For instance, in some societies menstrual blood is regarded as a beneficial substance when employed in certain rites but retains its baleful character in other contexts.

The two-in-one nature of blood - that is, of violence - is strikingly illustrated in Euripides' Ion. The Athenian queen, Creusa, plots to do away with the hero by means of an exotic talisman: two drops of blood from the deadly Gorgon. One drop is a deadly poison, the other a miraculous healing agent. The queen's old slave asks her the origin of the substance:
Creusa When the fatal blow was struck a drop spurted from the hollow vein.
Slave How was it used? What are its properties?
Creusa It wards off all sickness and nourishes life.
Slave And the other drop?
Creusa It kills. It is made from the Gorgon's venemous serpents.
Slave Do you carry them mixed together or separate?
Creusa Are good and evil to be mixed together? Separate, of course.
Nothing could seem more alike than two drops of blood, yet in this case nothing could be more different. It is only too easy to blend them together and produce a substance that would efface all distinction between the pure and impure. Then the difference between "good" and "bad" violence would be eliminated as well. As long as purity and impurity remain distinct, even the worst pollution can be washed away; but once they are allowed to mingle, purification is no longer possible.

Thanks!

2006-11-25T14:31:00.000-08:00

to everybody over at Korrektiv!

2006-11-24T16:14:00.000-08:00

St. Colman of Cloyne

2006-11-24T14:33:00.000-08:00

St. Colman of Cloyne was born in Munster, Ireland, son of Lenin. He became a poet and later, royal bard at Cashel. He was baptized by St. Brendan when he was fifty years old with the name Colman. He was ordained, and was reputed to be St. Columba's teacher. He became the first bishop of Cloyne, of which he is patron, in eastern Cork.

Happy Turkey Day!

2006-11-23T12:17:00.000-08:00

From René Girard's Violence and the Sacred

2006-11-22T11:24:00.000-08:00

The demands of regular employment are unfortunately keeping me from reading Girard as regularly as I would like, much less posting my favorite passages here. In any case, I'm proceeding as best I can, quoting here again from Chapter One. Before I do, I have to say that my own personal bugaboo, the the issue that keeps nagging at me when religion is regarded from a naturalist perspective, is how religion is supposed to deal with natural phenomena themselves. If religion is a natural phenomenon, how can it be expected to deal with more powerful natural phenomena? In short, how can a prayer (prayer that is merely an instance of natural phenomena) quell an earthquake? Girard takes up the issue in the first chapter:

Inevitably the moment comes when violence can only be countered by more violence. Whether we fail or succeed in our effort to subdue it, the real victor is always violence itself. The mimetic attributes of violence are extraordinary - sometimes direct and positive, at other times indirect and negative. The more men strive to curb their violent impulses, the more these impulses seem to prosper. The very weapons used to combat violence are turned against their users. Violence is like a raging fire that feeds on the very objects intended to smother its flames.

The metaphor of fire could well give way to metaphors of tempest, flood, earthquake. Like the plague, the resemblance violence bears to these natural cataclysms is not limited to the realm of poetic imagery. In acknowledging that fact, however, we do not mean to endorse the theory that sees in the sacred a simple transfiguration of natural phenomena.

The sacred consists of all those forces whose dominance over man increases or seems to increase in proportion to man's effort to master them. Tempests, forest fires, and plagues, among other phenomena, may be classified as sacred. Far outranking these, however, though in a far less obvious manner, stands human violence - violence seen as something exterior to man and henceforth as a part of all the other outside forces that threaten mankind. Violence is the heart and secret soul of the sacred. (31)

My difficulty with the end of the second paragraph is that although "we do not mean to endorse the theory that sees in the sacred a simple transfiguration of natural phenomena", many people do. In fact, isn't that exactly what people expect of the sacred? Not just another form of natural phenomena, but in fact some form of supernatural phenomena? And I'm not sure why this transfiguration would have to be 'simple'.

My difficulty with the third paragraph is that while 'primitive' man may have seen the escalation of collective violence as something outside themselves, and for perfectly good reasons, we moderns do not. Are we wrong? Does Girard's theory rest on this distinction? It seems to me that it does.

More anon.

Blaise Says

2006-11-21T11:56:00.000-08:00

Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical.

Claim Jumpers

2006-11-20T10:57:00.000-08:00

When I first heard that for my birthday my family was taking me to a new restaurant called CLAMjumpers, I was more excited than I've been since I don't remember when. I'd never heard of clams that jump, of course, and trying to imagine how an ordinary bi-valve leaps out of the sand just hurt my head, but I then I just took it on faith that these were some pretty special shellfish indeed. So imagine my surprise when, after driving around Tukwila for an hour in search of the place, I find myself parked in front of what looks like an Oklahoma ranch house designed by Victor Gruen himself.

And now, after looking up the website for the link provided above, I have to say I'm suspicious of any restaurant that has an "Enhanced Flash Site Requiring Flash Player 7". Just give me a menu, dammit. With clams on it. Still, it was a wonderful time, and eating bass in a steakhouse has a special delight all its own. It really was quite good. My thanks to the entire family.

Casino Royale

2006-11-19T10:50:00.000-08:00

The marquee of the Neptune Theater reads "Where art thou, Brosnan?", but I actually liked Daniel Craig more than Brosnan. More Connery and less Moore. Although I've liked Brosnan in other things, like that remake of the Steve McQueen movie, so maybe it had more to do with the movies themselves and things like that awful sequence in the ice palace. This was definitely the best Bond movie I've seen in a while. And Eva Green is absolutely stunning.

Hard Light

2006-11-18T18:27:00.000-08:00

New work by Robert Hardgrave and Warren Dykeman is being shown from November 10 until December 2, 2006 at the BLVD Art Gallery at 2316 Second Avenue in Seattle. Robert Hardgrave in particular is an artist well worth keeping track of, in my humble opinion. The material is obviously pretty disorienting at first, but the talent behind it is unmistakable. And a lot of hard work, I'd guess. You can see more of his work at his website here. I think my favorite is "Braindriver"; third group down, seventh from the left.

St. Gregory Thaumaturgus

2006-11-17T23:19:00.000-08:00

Gregory was of a distinguished pagan family. He was born at Neocaesarea, Pontus, and studied law there. About 233, he and his brother, Athenodorus, accompanied his sister, who was joining her husband in Caesarea, Palestine, while they continued on to Beirut to continue their law studies. They met Origen and instead of going to Beirut, entered his school at Caesarea, studied theology, were converted to Christianity by Origen, and became his disciples. Gregory returned to Neocaesarea about 238, intending to practice law, but was elected bishop by the seventeen Christians of the city. It soon became apparent that he was gifted with remarkable powers. He preached eloquently, made so many converts he was able to build a church, and soon was so reknowned for his miracles that he was surnamed Thaumaturgus (the wonderworker). He was a much-sought-after arbiter for his wisdom and legal knowledge and ability, advised his flock to go into hiding when Decius' persecution of the Christians broke out in 250, and fled to the desert with his deacon. On his return, he ministered to his flock when plague struck his See and when the Goths devastated Pontus, 252-254, which he described in his "Canonical Letter." He participated in the synod of Antioch, 264-265, against Samosata, and fought sabellianism and Tritheism. It is reported that at his death at Neocaesarea, only seventeen unbelievers were left in the city. He is invoked against floods and earthquakes (at one time he reportedly stopped the flooding Lycus, and at another, he moved a mountain). According to Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory Thaumaturgus experienced a vision of Our Lady, the first such recorded vision. He wrote a panegyric to Origen, a treatise on the Creed, and a dissertation addressed to Theopompus; St. Gregory of Nyssa wrote a panegyric to Gregory Thaumaturgus. (catholic.org)

At least my fly is zipped up

2006-11-16T22:21:00.000-08:00

Here's what turned up in the comment box on Mark Shea's blog:

Is it wrong and petty of me to point out that Korrektiv should not be talking about Duals with Satan, unless he means that there are two of them?

Duels.

I make many spelling errors myself, Lord knows, especially in the blogging world--but its like talking to someone with a bit of spinach stuck between his teeth. You'd like to be intellectually engaged in the serious topic of Biblical scholarship, but, there's that green scrap when he smiles.

Ouch! He is me. Whoops! There I go again: should be "He is I". One week it's a long, gray hair growing out of my right nostril, the next it's a green scrap of spinach in my teeth.

For the record, I appreciate the original correction. It was sloppy of me, and might even lead someone to a gnostic interpretation of the whole episode. And come to think of it, maybe even the word "duels" isn't really an intellectually engaging way of discussing a serious topic of biblical scholarship. But yeah, I think it's kind of petty to bring it up on someone else's blog. And I think the question at the beginning shows I'm not the only one who thinks so.

Karakkaze yarô

2006-11-16T22:08:00.000-08:00

Afraid to Die is a surprisingly good Yakuza movie starring the Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima in his first of five film roles. The cinematography is excellent, and the story of a gangster released from prison who must either kill or be killed has enough twists and turns to keep it interesting. There's an incredible nightclub scene that has a showgirl singing about long, thick bananas; I'm not sure how that one made it past the censors in 1960, but now it's just plain hilarious. Mishima is very good as a kind of darker, Japanese version of James Dean.

On Pasolini's Accattone

2006-11-15T13:02:00.000-08:00

In English, The Scrounger, and in any language it's a very good movie, the first directed by Pasolini. Franco Citti, who would later appear in The Godfather, plays Vittorio, aka Accattone, who hangs out with friends at cafes and lives off whatever his girlfriend, Maddalena, can earn as a prostitute. Which makes him a pimp, a name he loathes, preferring the less reprobative "Accattone". Life gets complicated for Accatone when Maddalena is beat up by a band of thugs and then, on top of that, perjures herself by blaming the wrong guys. After trying to patch things up with the former Mrs. Accatone without success, he stumbles onto Stella, a young woman trying to lead a good life. Accatone himself tries to lead a better life by getting a real job, but finds it much more difficult than even he would have thought. Accatone seems to me the essence of realist cinema, or neo-realist, or whatever it's called, and although it's not a masterpiece on the level of some of the other Pasolini movies I've seen recently, it is multo, multo bene and you should watch it, too.

Blaise Says

2006-11-14T13:55:00.000-08:00

When we see a natural style, we are astonished and charmed; for we expected to see an author, and we find a person.

Excerpt from René Girard's Violence and the Sacred

2006-11-13T11:53:00.000-08:00

I'm rereading Girard's 1972 classic work, in many ways the foundation for much of his later work (his earlier books were literary criticism on novelists), just to be sure I know what I'm talking about when I pull out his name during cocktail parties and obsessive blog posts about Pasolini.

Girard identifies the sacrificial act as his primary subject and outlines his task on the first page by stating that mystery surrounds sacrifice for a number of reasons; one is its resemblance to criminal violence (so that its perpetrators would have a vested interest in mystifying its origins), and the other is that because it has been deemed an institution almost entirely symbolic, "it is a subject that lends itself to insubstantial theorizing." (VS 1) Hopefully what we are about to read here is more substantial theorizing.

He goes on to reference other authors (Storr, Lorenz) on the physiology and sociology of violence, and then give us what I think is one of the most important paragraphs in the first chapter:

Violence is frequently called irrational. It has its reasons, however, and can marshal some rather convincing ones when the need arises. Yet these reasons cannot be taken seriously, no matter how valid they may appear. Violence itself will discard them if the initial object remains persistently out of reach and continues to provoke hostility. When unappeased, violence seeks and always finds a surrogate victim. The creature that excited its fury is abruptly replaced by another, chosen only because it is vulnerable and close at hand.

His use of the word "creature" here is telling; violence is a phenomenon that is spread across the animal kingdom, and violence among men naturally has its roots in his biological beginnings.

How You Found Quotidian Quintilian XVI

2006-11-12T13:41:00.000-08:00

A Google search for "literary amimal sex stories" has apparently brought up my humble site as a source. I guess it might be my Notes on Pasolini's Porcile, although there's not much sex there. In any case I hope 24.226.10 from Oakville, Ontario found what he or she was looking for. Or maybe I don't.

From the Music Video Archives

2006-11-11T23:59:00.000-08:00

High, by the Cure, was on the 1992 album Wish. For my money (zilch, actually, having invested so many hours waiting in front of the television until this song finally came up again), this was one of the best music videos ever. The song is fantastic, and the cinematography with all those lush blues and golds in an overexposed skyscape is pretty breathtaking. Is that a gondola or a big chunk of some gothic cathedral? Was that a tongue that just came out of Robert Smith's mouth, or a snake? What's he doing on the kite?

when I see you sticky as lips/as licky as trips/I can't lick that far/but when you pout/the way you shout out loud/it makes me want to start/and when I see you happy as a girl/that swims in a world of magic show/it makes me bite my fingers through/to think I could've let you go

On this Veteran's Day

2006-11-11T22:49:00.000-08:00

Thanks to my Dad, my step-Dad, my two uncles, and my grandfather for their service in uniform. To all veterans, actually: vobis gratias.

St. Leo the Great

2006-11-10T13:13:00.000-08:00

St. Leo the Great was born in Tuscany. As deacon, he was dispatched to Gaul as a mediator by Emperor Valentinian III. He reigned as Pope between 440 and 461. He persuaded Emperor Valentinian to recognize the primacy of the Bishop of Rome in an edict in 445. The doctrine of the Incarnation was formed by him in a letter to the Patriarch of Constantinople, who had already condemned Eutyches. At the Council of Chalcedon this same letter was confirmed as the expression of Catholic Faith concerning the Person of Christ.

All secular historical treatises eulogize his efforts during the upheaval of the fifth century barbarian invasion. His encounter with Attila the Hun, at the very gates of Rome persuading him to turn back, remains a historical memorial to his great eloquence. When the Vandals under Genseric occupied the city of Rome, he persuaded the invaders to desist from pillaging the city and harming its inhabitants. He died in 461, leaving many letters and writings of great historical value. His feast day is November 10th.

On Bresson's Journal d'un curé de campagne

2006-11-10T12:58:00.000-08:00

Diary of a Country Priestis a good movie. Maybe not a great one, as I was hoping, but a very solid adaptation of Bernanos' novel. Which is a great novel and although it isn't en vogue to say this (and maybe pointless to do so), I think the story is such that it leads to a complexity of thought and feeling that comes only with the courage to bring it in to being. As rushed as events seem to transpire in the film, and perhaps even in the novel, I think it's wrong to criticize the story as naive or somehow 'untrue' to life as more truly lived. This is probably a subject for another day as well. I would definitely recommend reading the book first.

On Bergman's Jungfrukällan

2006-11-09T12:43:00.000-08:00

The Virgin Spring in English. Another movie about sex, violence, loss and revenge set in the medieval era, this time in the northern Eden of 14th century Sweden. Maz von Sydow plays a father with two daughters, one a black haired pagan who at the beginning of the movie invokes the god Odin, the other a blond haired innocent whose kindness towards travelling swineherds leads to trouble. Cinematically this has to be one of the most beautiful films ever made. The cinematographer Sven Nykvist is a true master of the art; the black and white film has a silvery quality that is radiant. Girard could probably be brought to bear on the subject matter here as well, but that's a project for another day.

On Herzog's Stroszek

2006-11-09T12:31:00.000-08:00

A German alcoholic named Bruno Stroszek is released from prison, meets up with an old friend, a prostitute played by Eva Mattes, and ekes out a living as a street musician. Although he's a street musician with a cool apartment and a baby grand piano he can play while Eva brings him drinks. They're harassed and beaten by a bunch of thugs so much that they decide to go seek their fortune with their friend Scheitz in Wisconsin. They move into a trailer home, drink a lot of beer, and eventually the trailer is repossessed. There's a pretty funny auction scene. Stroszek and Scheitz decide to rob a store; minutes later Scheitz is nabbed by the cops while Stroszek eludes capture in a convenience store. He takes off in a station wagon, then switches to a big blue truck. He eventually burns out the engine and leaves it running around in circles in a parking lot until it catches on fire. There's a weird scene in an arcade with dancing chickens, piano playing chickens, all of which seems to point back towards Bruno and the circle he seems to be going around and around in. The end of the movie shows him taking a chair lift up to the top of a mountain, where it's quite possible he shoots himself. There, now you don't have to watch it.

Collected Notes on Pasolini's Porcile

2006-11-08T10:35:00.000-08:00

A lot of people have been asking me about Pasolini's Pigsty, wondering whether I'm going to write a book about it, or at least a dissertation. No to both, sadly, but I've decided to list all of my blog posts here for easy perusal, and for all those internet searches on the subject in the years to come.

Initial Notes on Pasolini's Porcile

In which I attempt to lay out some of the problems and questions raised by the filmmaker in his minor masterpiece from 1969, and lay the groundwork for a viewing of the film with the help of Rene Girard's work The Violence and the Sacred.

Further Notes on Pasolini's Porcile

One uppity question about Pasolini's use of dogs in a crucial scene from Pigsty, followed by what I hope is not an overly labored attempt to see the film through that 'Girardian lens'. Plus a comment by one Mr. McCain, in which he wonders whether the saints should perhaps be brought to bear on this mighty struggle towards a true interpretation.

Still More Notes on Pasolini's Porcile

A quotation from Mr. Pasolini from 1967, two years prior to the making of Pigsty, in which he himself attempts to frame his life in terms of the question that has so beset men of every temperment in every age, and in the ages to come. Plus, what might well be a labored attempt to see the film through that Girardian lens. And what's more, a comment from Mr. Red Pants with referrals to several other films, particularly Hammer's Vampire Circus, which upon further reflection might prove to be a key to understanding that very curious nexus of Catholicism, Violence, and especially the semiotics of sarcophagy, drinking blood, and the portrayal of each in film. Curiously, nay, mysteriously, this post appeared on All Soul's Day, when perhaps such crucial questions about the key issues of our time (any time!) should be aired in full cognizance of their true context.

Last Notes on Pasolini's Porcile

In this fourth post I final undertake an interpretation of the other half of the film, the modern half, the three previous entries being devoted almost entirely to the pre-industrial sequences of the film. Two long soliloquies are excerpted here, studiously copied down by me, by hand, frame by frame, so that you may read them, said soliloquies being available nowhere else on the internet. Plus, at last, an attempt by me at explaining the title of the movie and its last chilling moments, with special attention paid towards an understanding of the sacred and profane as understood in Hebrew culture (that unique sociological entity which may truly said to be sub specie aeternitatis), an understanding which, I might add, I have to wonder whether Signor Pasolini himself would have been able to intuit but for the miracle of his art.

Blaise Says

2006-11-07T11:28:00.000-08:00

In each action we must look beyond the action at our past, present, and future state, and at others whom it affects, and see the relations of all those things. And then we shall be very cautious.

Quotidian Quintilian Rerun: On The Brothers, by Frederick Barthelme

2006-11-06T04:32:00.000-08:00

Notes on Pasolini's Uccellacci e uccellini

2006-11-05T15:14:00.000-08:00

Totò (Totò) and his son Ninetto (Ninetto Davoli) walk a long road for a business trip, and after stopping in a small town they meet a talking crow that echoes all kinds of leftist platitudes. He also tells them a story about two followers of St. Francis, and as he tells the story Totò and Ninetto are themselves transformed into these two monks (or perhaps the actors playing Totò and Ninetto double as the two monks). St. Francis orders the two to convert the Hawks and the Sparrows, and this they are able to do after a long and mighty effort by the older monk. They return to St. Francis, who responds in a way they hadn't expected. They go back out on the road, and then we are returned to the journey still travelled by the businessman, his son, and the talking crow (which makes a lot more sense after the Fransiscan interlude). Is the leftist commentary spoken by the crow supposed to be the fruits of the missionary work by the two monks? Or is it perhaps a contradiction of the earlier religious message? The movie is certainly vague enough for either interpretation.

The three have several more adventures, some of them fairly bawdy, some of them rather like religious fables themselves. Totò as a character is a perfect blend of Chaplin and Keaton, with a slightly sharper edge and good deal more lascivious. Ninetto is a bit of a mimbo, but perfect as a happy version of the prodigal son's brother. The soundtrack by Ennio Morricone is the best I've heard in some time, whether it's the sixties rock and roll at the beginning or the organ playing in the background elsewhere. And I've never heard credits sung before, and it works extremely well here. For all the ideology spouted by the crow, a great deal of joy comes through in scene after scene of this minor masterpiece. Watch it as soon as you can.

Last Notes on Pasolini's Porcile

2006-11-04T01:58:00.000-08:00

The other story in Pigsty revolves around Julian, the son of the wealthy German industrialist. It has a lot more dialogue, but that dialogue, and hence the sequence itself, is also a lot more boring. It's not just Herr Klotz's Hitler mustache that makes him a cliché; much of the conversation about the economics of post-war Germany between him and Herr Herdhitze has to be some of the cheapest satire around. The bourgeoisie are swine; capitalist pigs without an ounce of charm, discreet or otherwise. Is the movie really so lacking in subtlety? Well, perhaps not entirely. There is Julian, after all, about whom all the other characters in these scenes are at times obsessed. In conversation with Herdhitze, Klotz says about Julian:

My son was neither an obedient son nor disobedient. I and my Bertha have discussed this matter democratically. If he'd obeyed I'd have taken him under my wing… we'd have flown over Cologne's smokestacks of forges for buttons and cannons. But if he'd disobeyed me… I'd have crushed him. With a son not agreeing or disagreeing I could do nothing. God took care of it. What did he make of him? He wanted to do nothing and God let him die. He wanted to do something and God also let him live. Idleness, unemployment, exile: I don't know. Julian in his room there is an embalmed saint, neither dead nor alive. To our business!

After all the jabbering about politics and economics, I was somewhat awestruck at this monologue, with its insight into the living death that strikes so many young people in highly developed societies. Perhaps this was true even in Germany as it climbed out of the hell it made in the first half of the twentieth century.

The young woman, Ida, tries to escape this fate by her commitment to revolutionary politics, but Julian will have none of it because he is so focused on his inner life. He claims this inner life has claimed him, and yet he also seems chiefly concerned with a kind of egoistic pleasure taken from divorcing himself from the world around him.

Ida thinks he is succumbing to a form of paralysis that has grown out of his connection to his father. Julian is, in fact, eventually rendered immobile, bedridden with those inner obsessions, and when he is shown to have arisen from his sickbed he acknowledges that it was his relationship with his father that he was able to finally wake up. He then gives the following soliloquy, one of the stranger things I've heard in some time:

How strange and base my love is. I can't tell whom I love; it's of no interest. Never has an object of passion been so base. What matters are its pleasures. The profound deformation it causes in me is not desperation; if it were you'd have understood it… feeling disgust or compassion. Nothing is spent in my life. I say it without pride, stunned… with a scholar's objectivity. These pleasures are so beautiful, thrilling! Butt I can't dispel them, not even in thought. It's not something that happens with birth, with growing. There is nothing natural in it… hence I think of it always… the pleasure this love produces in me are… a grace that has struck me like the plague. Don't be amazed if with the anguish there is a constant, infinite gaiety. Should we be amazed at night by our horrible nightmares? They are the sincerity of my life. I've nothing else to combat reality with. I dreamed that I was on a dark road, full of puddles, among those puddles full of a light like the aurora borealis of the Siberian sunset, I was seeking something I can't remember, perhaps a toy. And there at the edge of the last puddle… a piglet. I approach to take him, touch him, and quickly he bites me, tears at four fingers, which were rubber. I walk around with these dangling fingers, distraught. A martyr's vocation? Who knows the truth of dreams, beyond that of making us eager for the truth?

Haunting. More than a little weird, although it gets even weirder. We are told by a group of peasants that Julian has walked into the pigsty, where we learn he has gone for refuge from human relationships, and has been (or perhaps has allowed himself to be) eaten alive. This obviously resonates with the end of the other sequence. It's all pretty messy: the description of events at the end, obviously, but also the ideological lectures, the dream narratives (as opposed to the dream landscapes of the 'primitive' sequence, and way characters seem to collide more than they interact.

Now, about that title. One possible interpretation I've been toying with is to think of the pigs in terms of their status in Judaic culture. In the movie Jews are alluded to only in the speech by Herr Klotz, but of course their very absence in post-war Germany is a kind of sign of the emptiness of the culture created in the wake of the war. What better sign to use for the decadence of the modern industrial state than the animal that best represents what isn't kosher? Of course Pasolini was a Marxist, and of course it's reflexively Marxist to refer to capitalists as "pigs", but I wonder if it doesn't go deeper than that here. Religion is as notably lacking at the modern German villa as it was present in the medieval town. All that remains are traces of a intense spiritual longing that is nourished only by an idle young man. The finger is pointed directly at the industrialists that profited during reconstruction just as they did during the war. And the spirituality that developed out of that culture is a food fit only for swine, anathema in the culture of the people who were all but wiped out of Hitler's Germany.

St. Martin de Porres

2006-11-03T10:28:00.000-08:00

St. Martin de Porres was born at Lima, Peru, in 1579. His father was a Spanish gentleman and his mother a coloured freed-woman from Panama. At fifteen, he became a lay brother at the Dominican Friary at Lima and spent his whole life there-as a barber, farm laborer, almoner, and infirmarian among other things.

Martin had a great desire to go off to some foreign mission and thus earn the palm of martyrdom. However, since this was not possible, he made a martyr out of his body, devoting himself to ceaseless and severe penances. In turn, God endowed him with many graces and wondrous gifts, such as, aerial flights and bilocation.

St. Martin's love was all-embracing, shown equally to humans and to animals, including vermin, and he maintained a cats and dogs hospital at his sister's house. He also possessed spiritual wisdom, demonstrated in his solving his sister's marriage problems, raising a dowry for his niece inside of three day's time, and resolving theological problems for the learned of his Order and for bishops. A close friend of St. Rose of Lima, this saintly man died on November 3, 1639 and was canonized on May 6, 1962. (catholic.org)

Still More Notes on Pasolini's Porcile

2006-11-02T15:10:00.000-08:00

If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief. ~ Pier Paolo Pasolini

I wrote earlier that I didn't think Pasolini was "wrong", but that his vision is limited and perhaps backwards, and I'd like to expand on that a bit more. Picking up that Girardian lens again, I'd like to note that one of his observations is that understanding religious thought requires an empirical approach. From Violence and the Sacred:

In its simplest, perhaps most elementary form, religion manifests little curiosity about the origins of those terrible forces that visit their fury on mankind but seems to concentrate its attention on determining a regular sequential pattern that will enable man to anticipate these onslaughts and take measures against them.

Religious empiricism invariably leads to one conclusion: it is essential to keep as far away as possible from sacred things, always to avoid direct contact with them. Naturally, such thinking occasionally coincides with medical empiricism or with scientific empiricism in genteral. This is why some observers insist on regarding religious empiricism as a preliminary stage of science.

Much more could certainly be said on these subjects, as indeed Girard does in the book, but my concern here is with Pasolini, and the point I was making in the previous post is that the Catholic priests in Porcile seem to be sacralizing violence that will lead back to the cyclical pattern rather than taking measures agains future onslaughts. But of course we could easily find evidence to support Pasolini's vision: popes blessing armies, "believers" torturing "unbelievers", and just plain complicity with evil of all kinds. Certainly there has been a lot of research in this area, so I won't bother going into it here. In fact somewhere, or rather in several places Girard has remarked on "historical Christianity" (I think I have that right), in which a good number of confessors and professors of the Christian faith really don't understand the nature of God's gift to humanity, and in missing the point perpetuate the evil which they have been called to transcend, as Christ was able to transcend it.

It certainly shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody that many Christians don't live up to the name, and I think it surprises Christians least of all.

How is this important to understanding Porcile? Well, it's reasonable to see that Pasolini is offering us a view of "religion" in general, with no distinction between Christianity and paganism - Christianity being "religion" generally because it has, historically speaking, been the dominant religion. Indeed, if one accepts it as the one, true faith, I think one has to accept that even as one differentiates it from other faiths, there are plenty of well intentioned (if unreligiously minded) people who will naturally see the accrual of evils perpetuated in the name of all religions to the one religion that should be different. But it isn't always different. In short, I think Pasolini is giving us a version of the "historical Christianity" criticized by Girard, the Christianity of Constantine, the Borgias, Torquemada, all those German Catholics who turned their backs on the death camps, and all the Catholics who even now defend abortion, and so on to the end of time. If I have a problem with Pasolini's presentation, it's that he presents "historical Christianity" as a kind of myth, and we all know how myths are easily taken for truth.

Which is why Pasolini's vision seems to me limited. It's not wrong, because he really has hit on the truth about the uglier side of Christianity, and Catholicism in particular. And since perhaps the darkest theme in the film concerns the cannibalism practiced by the Young Warrior (of which he speaks in a mantra on the way to his death), it may even be that the priests are defending the people against the spread of a barbarism that they know is the exact opposite of true worship (the Eucharist is not a form of cannibalism). Certainly the irony of a cannibal being staked out on the ground to be devoured by wild boars (sorry, dogs) carries a sense of poetic justice: in the end he is eaten by what he regards as a second course, at best. What impresses the viewer is the extreme violence of the film, first perpetrated by the Young Warrior, and then by the society that must defend itself against him. Violence perpetrated by society might be necessary, but not in the way it is delivered here, and its justification is that it is blessed and overseen by the priests.

It's a curious form of nostalgia.

St. Severinus

2006-11-01T14:38:00.000-08:00

(c. 609) Benedictine monk and hermit. He lived at Tivoli, near Rome, and his relies are enshrined in that city.

St. Amabilis

2006-11-01T14:33:00.000-08:00

(c. 475) Patron against fire and snakes. Amabilis served at the Clermont Cathedral and then Auvergne. He gained a reputation for holiness and effectiveness against fire and snakes.

Further Notes on Pasolini's Porcile

2006-11-01T12:45:00.000-08:00

One observation about one of the final 'medieval' scenes is that it would have worked better thematically I think, if Pasolini had used wild boars instead of dogs. But he must have thought of that, so why didn't he?

Regarding a Girardian perspective on the film, it seems to me that the later sequences involving retribution between tribes and the punishment inflicted on the Young Warrior at the end look very much like ancient cultures as described by Girard. One of Girard's great insights, however, is that myths actually enable to societies to obfuscate the origins of the violence that threatens to tear them (and each other) apart. This is true in Pasolini's film only to the extent that film is itself a kind of myth, although the self-consciously unedited reel ends in the course of the movie might well be a way of practicing a kind of deflection. Even if this is true, it's a distinctly post-modern deflection of the film on its own status as 'film' (and myth) and not 'reality', rather than 'sacrificial appeasement' in place of 'violence against created beings' (which is my short version of Girard's theory of the origins of sacrifice).

Also, Girard writes (in chapter 1 of Violence and the Sacred) that the sacrificial victim is able to deflect violence because it/he/she is innocent rather than guilty, and the Young Warrior is certainly not innocent. I wrote the other day that if these were indeed rituals at the end of the movie, we would have a Girardian moment before Girard wrote his major work on the subject. I now think that even with certain ritualistic trappings and even 'blessed', what we are shown is a more extravagant perpetration of violence. From a Girardian perspective, Pasolini has merely shown us the bloody cycle that sacrifice and myth are meant to prevent.

Most importantly, the idea of Catholic priests blessing human sacrifice is offensive (from a Girardian perspective, not to mention the Catholic one) because in Christianity we have the anti-mythology that allows us to truly free ourselves from cyclical violence. Of course this is a film, and Pasolini is presenting a fiction about the violence that has certainly persisted in Christianity. While Girard acknowledges this persistence, he sees the possibility that a truer interpretation of the Gospels, or perhaps the Gospels more truly lived, offers us the freedom we are unable to attain on our own. Violence is the blood we have on our hands that we ourselves cannot remove. As I wrote, I think Girard is right, and I while I don't think Pasolini is 'wrong', I think his vision is limited, if not bass ackwards. And I still haven't gotten to the title. Stay tuned for Part III.

Blaise Says

2006-10-31T15:04:00.000-08:00

Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth.

Notes on Pasolini's Porcile

2006-10-31T09:31:00.000-08:00

Pigsty is the title in English, a movie written and directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini that I've been watching over the last couple of nights. According to "ali-112" at IMDb the film has been shamefully botched in the transfer to to DVD, and it's true that the colors bleed all over the place, the film is badly scratched, and the reels themselves are shown running out three or four times in the course of its 99 minutes. But it's still an intriguing and at times deeply unsettling film for the reasons Pasolini presumably intended.

I'm not even going to try writing about this without describing key events in the film, so if you're interested in seeing the film yourself with suspense (such as it is) intact, consider yourself forwarned.

There are two stories presented here. One concerns a young warrior and takes place in a barren, volcanic landscape between a kind mythical medieval age, but with guns, while the other unfolds in a Rennaissance villa in the present era. The former story is almost entirely free of dialogue, or almost any words until very near the end, while the latter is presented to us in the abstract dialogue of a young man and woman in the beginning, and then other members of the young man's family as the story progresses (to the extent that it can be called a story at all; often it more resembles a philosophical dialogue on film).

The story of the young warrior begins when he comes across a helmet, sword and gun on the ground. He dons the armor and soon finds himself in combat with another strange warrior who could himself have just come across a helmet, sword and gun. He kills the other, takes off his armor, and then savagely renders the corpse. Then he eats it.

From this moment the brutality is carried further by the young warrior and a partner until it becomes a conflict between I think are two distinct tribes. There are what seem to be the development of rituals to celebrate and/or avenge the violence perpetrated on and by others i.e., tossing a victim's severed head into the mouth of a volcano, or earth vent, or whatever it is. The conflict and the society portrayed are elemental, savage, and cruel to a degree that must be considered evil - though of course if they are in fact rituals they are likely intended to ward off evil. As the young warrior is himself led to sacrifice at the end of the story he repeatedly says, "I killed my father, I ate human flesh, and I quiver with joy." He is staked out on the ground and left to wild dogs. As I said, it's all deeply unsettling.

Interspersed with this is the story that begins with a conversation between a young woman and man. As much as the other story is told in primeval images, this story consists almost entirely of dialogue that is sophisticated and at times so abstract it's hard to follow.

The young man is often as whimsical as the young woman is in earnest. She is an idealist, political, and alternates between demanding that he live up to her conception of him and pointing out what seem to her contradictions in his character. He puts her off in most of the scenes, chiefly because of her political concerns, and yet feebly pursues her in other scenes out of what seems to be (a fairly lame) erotic curiosity.

The story expands to the rest of the young man's family: his father, Herr Klotz, a former Nazi industrialist (too obviously sporting a Hitler mustache) and his mother, who is shown conversing with her husband and the young woman about her son.

A business partner (or perhaps competitor) shows up and meets with Herr Klotz. Their conversation covers everything from the good old days of Nazi Germany to the failure of Klotz's son to achieve anything. Some of this conversation is carried on while Herr Klotz plays heavenly strains on his harp, and the mansion in which it all takes place is as luxuriently austere as the other sequence was primordial.

It's hard to see, or at least it's hard to remember, what really becomes of the conversations and conflicts between each combination of characters. Herr Klotz and the other businessman end up toasting each other with glasses of beer; the mother and the young woman are shown conversing at the foot of a four-post bed in which the young man is stretched out in a position that both calls to mind and defies the position of the young warrior at the end of the other sequence.

Maybe it's the Girard I've been reading of late, but I couldn't help but see both stories in light of his observations on violence, sacrifice and society. The worlds depicted here are both polarized and similar to a point of common identity. Pasolini made the movie in the late sixties and therefore precedes Girard's major works on these themes, but I wonder whether he might have benefited from Girard's analysis. I think Pasolini somehow has it backwards, though I admit this may be because I read Girard first. Perhaps I can explain why in a longer post, but much of it has to do with Pasolini's take on the role of priests (and presumably the church) in the primitive sequence and the idealization of politics in the civilized sequence. Nevertheless, he has definitely hit on something in both stories. It's definitely worth a second viewing, and probably more than that. And I haven't even gotten into the title.

Aenigmata by Symphosius

2006-10-30T15:59:00.000-08:00

In the latest issue of Poetry, Richard Wilbur has published some translations of ancient Latin 'riddle' poetry, written by Symphosius in the fourth or fifth century. Richar Wilbur has done some originals of these himself, and they're pretty great. I didn't know it was a genre establised a long time ago. Hopefully Poetry won't sue me if I copy a few here:

Nebula
I wear night's face, although not black of skin,
And at high noon I bring the darkness in,
Ere Cynthia's beams, or starlight, can begin.

Glacies
I once was water, and soon shall be again.
Strict heaven binds me now by many a chain.
I crack when trodden, and when held give pain.

Nix
Light dust of water fallen from the sky,
I'm wet in summer and in winter dry.
Ere I make rivers, whole lands I occupy.

Navis
Long daughter of the forest, swift of pace,
In whom old neighbors join as beam and brace,
I speed on many paths, yet leave no trace.

Aranea
Athena schooled me in the weaver's trade.
The robes I make require no shuttle's aid.
I have no hands; by feet my works are made.

And these are the easy ones, I think. Forget about Sudoku, get the latest issue of Poetry!

Rain by Edward Thomas

2006-10-29T15:20:00.000-08:00

It's been raining pretty hard here in Seattle, off and on. I thought of the poem by Edward Thomas, the English poet who wrote most of his poems in the space of a few years leading up to World War 1. He died on a battlefield in France in April, 1917.

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying to-night or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be towards what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.

Here is another favorite of mine:

Gone, Gone Again

Gone, gone again,
May, June, July,
And August gone,
Again gone by,

Not memorable
Save that I saw them go,
As past the empty quays
The rivers flow.

And now again,
In the harvest rain,
The Blenheim oranges
Fall grubby from the trees

As when I was young -
And when the lost one was here -
And when the war began
To turn young men to dung.

Look at the old house,
Outmoded, dignified,
Dark and untenanted,
With grass growing instead

Of the footsteps of life,
The friendliness, the strife;
In its beds have lain
Youth, love, age, and pain:

I am sometimes like that;
Only I am not dead,
Still breathing and interested
In the house that is not dark: -

I am something like that:
Not one pane to reflect the sun,
For the schoolboys to throw at -
They have broken every one.

Der Amerikanische Soldat

2006-10-28T14:49:00.001-07:00

I watched this movie for the third time last night. After reading the IMDb review by Mr. Planktonrules, I think he's right about a couple of things. It is pretty amateurish. Some camera shots are right out of a sixties TV crime drama like Mannix or The Mod Squad. But some others are pretty well done, and I'd still give RWF an A for effort, and then maybe a C- for execution. Or a D. Who cares about grading movies, anyway? I think it's a dumb practice, even if I used to do it myself. Mr. Planktonrules is also right about the truly awful suicide scene (by future director Margarethe von Trotta), and the whole thing certainly does look like a rip-off of Goddard's Alphaville, which, as he says, is a pretty overrated movie itself. So why did I watch it yet a third time? I don't know. I really don't. It really is a mystery to me, too. Never again!

St. Frumentius

2006-10-27T10:56:00.002-07:00

(c. 380) Called “Abuna” or “the father” of Ethiopia, sent to that land by St. Athanasius. Frumentius was born in Tyre, Lebanon. While on a voyage in the Red Sea with St. Aedesius, possibly his brother, only Frumentius and Aedesius survived the shipwreck. Taken to the Ethiopian royal court at Aksum, they soon attained high positions. Aedesius was royal cup bearer, and Fruementius was a secretary. They introduced Christianity to that land. When Abreha and Asbeha inherited the Ethiopian throne from their father, Frumentius went to Alexandria, Egypt, to ask St. Athanasius to send a missionary to Ethiopia. He was consecrated a bishop and converted many more upon his return to Aksum. Frumentius and Aedesius are considered the apostles of Ethiopia. (catholic.org)

On Cosmos, by Witold Gombrowicz

2006-10-26T13:06:00.000-07:00

Well, I finally finished the novel, after rereading each chapter two or three times. Today's excerpt comes from chapter eight, the longest in the novel, and concerns a pivotal conversation between Witold, the narrator, and Leon Wojtys, the patriarch of the family in whose home he has stayed and with whom he is now travelling in the mountains around Zakopane.

This meeting of ours was so unpleasant, sideways, without looking, as if sightless - more and more blossoms in the grass, blue and yellow, clusters of spruce, pines, the terrain was descending, and I had moved quite far, an incomprehensible matter of otherness and distance, in the silence of butterflies fluttering, a breeze blowing gently, earth and grass, forests turning into peaks, a bald patch under a tree, pince-nez - Leon.

He sat on the stump of a tree smoking a cigarette.

"What are you doing here?"

"Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing," he replied and smiled blissfully.

"What's so amusing?"

"What? Nothing! Exactly that: nothing! Ha! that's a language game, if you please, hm . . . I'm amused by 'nothing,' mark you, Your Reverence, my venerable companion and merry-maker and horse-drawn carriage, because 'nothing' is exactly what we do all our lives. A fellow stands, sits, talks, writes, and . . . nothing. A fellow buys, sells, marries, doesn't marry and - nothing. A fellow sitzum on a stumpium and - nothing. Soda pop."

He was drawling these words, with nonchanlance, condescendingly.

I said: "You talk as if you've never wrroked."

"Never worked? But I have! Yes indeed! Definitely! At the bankie! The little bankie! From the dumb bankie-dear straight into the stomach! A whale. Hm. Thirty-two years! And what? Nothing!"

He pondered and blew on his hands.

"It's run through my fingers!"

"What has?"

He replied nasally, monotonously:

"Years disintegrate into months, months into days, days into hours, minutes into seconds, seconds run past. You won't catch them. Everything runs past. Flies away. Who am I? I am a certain number of seconds - that have run past. The result: nothing. Nothing."

He flared up and exclaimed: "It's thievery!" He took off his pince-nez and began to tremble, like a little old man, like one of those indignant little old men one sees at times standing on street corners, or in a trolley, or in front of a cinema, vociferating. Should I talk to him? Say something? But what? I was still lost, not knowing which way to go, to the right, to the left, so many threads, connections, insinuations, if I wanted to enumerate all of them from the very beginning I would be lost, cork, saucer, the trembling of a hand, the chimney, a cloud of objects and matters undeciphered, first one detail then another would link up, dovetail, but then other connections would immediately evolve, other connections - this is what I lived by as if I were not living, chaos, a pile of garbage, a slurry - I was putting my hand inside a sack of garbage, pulling out whatever turned up, looking to see if it would be suitable for the construction of . . . my little home . . . that was acquiring, poor thing, fantastic shapes . . . and so on without end . . . But what about this Leon? I've been wondering for some time why he seems to be circling in my vicinity, even seconding me, there was some similarity, take the fact that he was losing himself in seconds as I was in trifles, well, well, there were also other leads providing food for thought, those bread pellets during supper and other trifles, the ti-ri-ri, and again, more recently, I don't know why, I fantasized that the disgusting "selfness" ("gratify yourself with yourself . . ."), creeping toward me from the Toleks' and from the priest's direction was also somehow making its way toward Leon. What harm would it do to hint at the sparrow and all the other wonders back home? Put it to him and see what I can see, I was, after all, like a soothsayer, looking into a crystal ball, into smoke.

One way of looking at the novel, philosophically speaking, I think, is to see Leon as a character living out, as purely as possible, a kind of chronological axis, while Witold is obsessed with a spatial axis. In this way they form the boundaries of the space-time continuum that is the 'form' of the novel, or perhaps they are the characters that come closest to approaching the form in which they and all the other characters must necessarilay live and move. Witold is only able to do this with a great deal of frustration and anxiety, which perhaps culminates in his perpetration of a grisley event that forms a link in a chain of events that he had hithertofore only been a witness. Leon, further along in life, is obviously having some difficulty coming to terms with the manner in which he has lived out his years, months, days, hours and seconds.

They are both on to each other, but that doesn't mean that together they will be able to puzzle through the mysterious reality in which they are captured. Perhaps this is because they live along different axes, perhaps it is because as characters they are socially somewhat 'opposed' to one another, but whatever the reason it is utterly bewildering and fascinating to see them end up by communicating through the repetition of a nonsensical word invented by Leon to explain his manner of occupying time. What the hell does it mean? If you read on, you ask this question more and more. Perhaps, as Leon says, it all comes to nothing. Perhaps, as Witold intimates several times in the later chapters, it all goes towards the construction of 'his little home,' whatever and wherever that may be. Gombrowicz doesn't give us much in the way of clues, and even at the end of the novel the narrator has been delivered back to the home he inhabited before the beginning of the story.

If all this sounds a little abstract . . . well, at times it is, but not all the time, and much of the time it really is exhilerating. There are details repeated over and over again, some of the best portraits of mundane reality since Beckett. But it's better than Beckett, in my opinion, or Gombrowicz has lifted Beckett-style observations to a more mysterious and even contemplative level.

On top of all this, it must be added that Gombrowicz seems to be onto something with the Church, by which I mean the one, holy, catholic and apostolic. It isn't direct, and I wouldn't say it's necessarily the most important thing in the novel, but the character of the priest and the cossack he wears is important, and the freakish, violent absolution (okay, if not absolution, what is it?) that he tries to steal towards the end must surely signify something. Okay, I'm giving the game away, but the scene is begging to be quoted:

We sometimes see this in the movies, in a comedy, a hunter moving slowly with his weapon ready to fire, and on his heels treads a terrible beast, a huge bear, a gigantic gorilla. It was teh priest. He walked right behind me, a little to one side, he seemed to trail at the very end, not knowing why or what for, perhaps he was afraid to stay by himself in the house - at first I didn't notice him, he came straggling up to me - with those peasant fingers of his, fumbling. With his cassock. Heaven and hell. Sin. The Holy Catholic Church, Our Mother. The chill of the confessional. Sin. In saecula saeculorum. Church. The chill of the confessional. Church and Pope. Sin. Damnation. Cassock. Heaven and hell. Ite missa est. Sin. Virtue. Sin. The chin of the confessional. Sequentia sancti . . . Church. Hell. Cassock. Sin . . . The chill of the confessional.

I pushed him hard and he reeled.

The moment I pushed him I became scared - what am I doing?! A quirk, a prank! He'll raise Cain!

But no. My hand encountered such a miserable passivity that I calmed down right away. he stopped but did not look at me. We stood. I saw his face clearly. And his mouth. I raised my hand, I wanted to stick my finger into his mouth. But his teeth were clenched. I raised his chin with my left hand, opened his mouth, stuck my finger in.

I pulled out my finger and was wiping it on my handkerchief.

Now I had to walk faster to catch up with the procession. Sticking my finger into the priest's mouth did me good, although it's one thing (I thought) to stick a finger into a corpse and another to do it to someone living, it was like introducing my phantoms into the real world. I felt invigorated. I realized taht with all this happening I had forgotten for the moment about the sparrow, etc., but now I was again thinking that about fifteen miles back, the sparrow was there - and the stick was there - and the cat. And also Katasia.

I should note that several times in the course of the novel, Witold, says "I'm sick," and if only to judge from his actions, the reader has no real reason to doubt him. But if he is an 'unreliable narrator', he is at least reliably forthright about his unreliability in the manner of madmen who at least know they are mad. Which why I say that in spite of the insanity, in spite of the inanity, and in spite of the asininity so carefully compiled, he is on to something. Or up to something. Something great.

How You Found Quotidian Quintilian XV

2006-10-25T00:01:00.000-07:00

Here's a puzzler:

mass riddle if one person went downstairs the number would be equal if one person went upstairs the number would double

Start with one person in the basement, four people on the ground level, and three people upstairs. Then you hit the f button, or whatever it is, and you end up with two people in the basement, two people on the ground level, and four upstairs. If 205.188.116 from somewhere in the neighborhood of Wichita, Kansas didn't find it before, they'll find it now.

Now what mass has to do with it, I have no idea. For that I would recommend this book. If anybody can set you straight there, Father Driscoll can.

Blaise Says

2006-10-24T15:04:00.000-07:00

We are only falsehood, duplicity, contradiction; we both conceal and disguise ourselves from ourselves.

from Cosmos

2006-10-23T14:34:00.000-07:00

Is this or is this not worthy of Walker Percy? Others might ask whether Percy is worthy of Gombrowicz. Well, we have them both, thank goodness. Here's Gombrowicz, from page 116 of Cosmos:

Thy took their seats around the big table in the hall, several doors opened into the adjoining rooms, there was a staircase that led to the upper floors. The doors were open, revealing rooms that were totally bare except for a few beds and chairs, lots of chairs. The table was laden with food, spirits were high - more wine anyone? - but the gaiety was of the kind that is created at parties when everyone is jolly just to avoid spoiling the mood for the others, while in fact, everyone is slightly absent, like at a railway station, like waiting for a train - and this absence was connecting with the destitution of this house found by chance, bare, without curtains, wardrobes, bed sheets, drawings, or shelves, with only windows, beds, and chairs. In this emptiness not only words but also persons reverberated loudly. Roly-Poly and Leon in particular were as if inflated in a vaccum and boomed with their persons, while their booming was accompanied by the hubbub of their guests eating heartily, pierced through by the Lulus' giggles, and Fuks, already quite drunk, was acting like an ass, I knew he drank to drown Drozdowski and their mutual wretchedness, his alienation being similar to mine with my parents . . . he, the luckless, the dupe, the irritating civil servant, forced one to shut one's eyes or to look away. Roly-Poly, the magnificent dispenser of salads and sausages, entertaining, entreating, inviting, please, ladies and gentlemaen, try this, there's plenty, we won't starve, I guarantee you, and so on, and so on - busily making sure everything was tip-top, with style, well, well, an eccentric sort of expedition, fun and games, no one will be able to say they haven't had enought to eat or drink. And also Leon's doubling and tripling himself, the Amphitrion, teh commander-in-chief, the initiator, hey, hey, all together now . . .

This was his final novel; the only thing he published after this were a few diary entries, which he kept on and off throughout the fifties and sixties. The diaries are also great reading, although many of the cultural figures have been lost in the monstrous human crash, to borrow Robert Lowell's phrase. Anyway it's a fine novel, one of the finest, really, and you should go and read it as soon as you can.

An Afternoon at the Opera

2006-10-22T17:08:00.000-07:00

Did my part-time gig at the Seattle Opera this afternoon, another matinee performance of Rossini's wonderful L'italiana in Algeri, this time with Helene Schneiderman and Lawrence Brownlee in the lead roles, both of them excellent. As far as I could tell from the closed-circuit television, anyway.

I was amazed again at the people on display there in the auditorium - the Sunday matinees offer perhaps the best place for people watching anywhere, including the airport. I didn't see any men in tuxedoes, but there were some older couples that went all out. In 2006 that can sometimes mean pretty far out, and today I saw snakeskin cowboy boots and purple fedoras. There were a lot of kids there as well, which I certainly think is a good thing, and sometimes they look like replicas of their parents, and sometimes they look like replicas of rebellion: goth make-up, piercings, almost anything goes, really. And not just for the kids. One couple biked to the opera - or at least that appeared to be the case, given the brightly colored spandex, those nifty biking caps, and special bike cleats they were wearing while sipping white wine at intermission.

from Cosmos

2006-10-21T15:53:00.000-07:00

by Witold Gombrowicz:

Moonless star-filled sky - stupendous - constellations emerged out of the swarms of stars, some I knew, the Big Dipper, the Great Bear, I was identifying them, but others, unfamiliar to me, were also lurking there, as if inscribed into the distribution of the major stars, I tried to fill in lines that mght bind them into forms . . . and this deciphering, this charting, suddenly wearied me, I switched to the little garden, but here too the multiplicity of objects such as a chimney, a pipe, the angle of a gutter, the crnice of a wall, a small tree, as well as their more involved combinations like the turn and disappearance of the path, the rhythm of shadows, soon wearied me . . . yet I would begin anew, though reluctantly, to look for forms, patterns, I no longer felt like it, I was bored and impatient and cranky, until I realized that what riveted me to these objects, how shall I put it, what attracted me to the "behind," the "beyond," was the way that one object was "behind" the other, that the pipe was behind the chimney, the wall was behind the corner of the kitchen, just like . . . like . . . like . . . at supper when Katasia's lips were behind Lena's little mouth when Katasia moved the ashtray with the wire mesh while leaning over Lena, lowering her slithering lips close to . . . I was more suproisd than I should have been, at this point I was inclined to exaggerate everything, and besides, the constellations, the Big Dipper, etc., amounted to something cerebral, exhausting, and I though "what? mouths, together?" I was particularly astonished by the fact that both their mouths were now, in my imagination, in my memory, more closely linked together than then, at the table, I tried to clear my head by shaking it, but that made the connection of Lena's lips with Katasia's lips even more clear-cut, so I smirked, because truly, Katasia's twirled-up lasciviousness, her slipping into swinish lust had nothing, absolutely nothing in common with the fresh parting and innocent closing of Lena's lips, it's just that one was "in relation to the other" - as on a map, where one city is in relation to another city - anyway, th eidea of maps had emtered my head, a map of the sky, or an ordinary map with cities, etc. The entire "connection" ws not really a connection, merely one mouth considered in relation to another mouth, in the sense of distance, for example, of direction and position . . . nothing more . . . but, while I now estimated that Katasia's mouth was most likely somewhere in the vicinity of the kitchen (she slept thereabouts), in fact I wondered where, in what direction, and at what distance was it from Lena's little mouth. And my coldly-lustful striving in the hallway toward Katasia underwent a dislocation because of Lena's incidental intrusion.

Cosmos is one of my favorite novels, and what a surprise to find it translated anew by Danuta Borchardt for the Yale Press. The Grove Press edition, bound together with Pornografia, was better than nothing, but this new volume far, far outshines that earlier version. Hopefully Ms Borchardt has already begun a new translation of Pornografia to sit alongside Cosmos and Ferdydurke.

Cosmos might be the best, combining a kind of noirish mystery (in what seems to be a 19th century Polish landscape with pensiones and horse-drawn wagons) with a kind of philosophical speculation that betrays the unbridled desperation and cunning subversion of the narrator, who, for all we know, is simply making the whole thing up as he goes.

St. Paul of the Cross

2006-10-20T11:47:00.002-07:00

St. Paul of the Cross was born at Ovada in the Republic of Genoa, January 3, 1694. His infancy and youth were spent in great innocence and piety. He was inspired from on high to found a congregation; in an ecstacy he beheld the habit which he and his companions were to wear. After consulting his director, Bishop Gastinara of Alexandria in Piedmont, he reached the conclusion that God wished him to establish a congregation in honor of the Passion of Jesus Christ. On November 22, 1720, the bishop vested him with the habit that had been shown to him in a vision, the same that the Passionists wear at the present time. From that moment the saint applied himself to repair the Rules of his institute; and in 1721 he went to Rome to obtain the approbation of the Holy See. At first he failed, but finally succeeded when Benedict XIV approved the Rules in 1741 and 1746. Meanwhile St. Paul built his first monastery near Obitello. Sometime later he established a larger community at the Church of St. John and Paul in Rome. For fifty years St. Paul remained the indefatigable missionary of Italy. God lavished upon him the greatest gifts in the supernatural order, but he treated himself with the greatest rigor, and believed that he was a useless servant and a great sinner. His saintly death occurred at Rome in the year 1775, at the age of eighty-one. He was canonized by Pope Pius IX in 1867. His feast day is October 20. ~catholic.org

"The way to free oneself from deceits is to humble oneself well, not to trust oneself, to recognize one's nothingness, to annihilate oneself before God, and to abandon one's self with filial confidence in the arms of God." ~ from a letter of St. Paul of the Cross

How You Found Quotidian Quintilian XIV

2006-10-19T14:35:00.000-07:00

Liberating the Middle East from Islamofascism, one city at a time.

Satansbraten

2006-10-19T13:43:00.000-07:00

AKA, in Englisch, as Satan's Brew. This is Fassbinder's 28th of the 41 total films he amassed in his still all-too-brief career, and for my money it's the funniest and sunniest of the whole lot of them. Perhaps even his best, perhaps because, althought there's a lot of murder, sadomascism and other forms of mayhem, there's no suicide. Whew! What a relief, after Fox and His Friends, Veronika Voss, Fear of Fear, In a Year with 13 Moons and Berlin Alexanderplatz, not to end up swinging from the end of a rope or with a stomach full of pills, or whatever. I'd write a synopsis, but this guy Jim has already written such a fine one that I'm just going to steal his.

Satan's Brew is not for the faint of heart! It is about Walter Kranz (Kurt Raab), a womanizing would-be "great writer" who scrambles for every pfennig he can lay his greedy little hands on. He lives with a totally batty brother named Ernst (Volker Spengler), who is forever capturing and trying to fornicate with flies (yes, houseflies), and a dumpling of a wife, Luisa (Helen Vita), the only relatively sane character in the film, yet one who keeps scrupulous count of how many days Walter has not had sex with her. No wonder, since he is constantly getting it on with the wealthy masochist Irmgart von Witzleben (Katherina Buchhammer) – whom he accidentally shoots while she is in the throes of passion writing Walter a huge check for his kinky services; his Marxist mistress Lisa (Ingrid Caven), whose husband Rolf (Marquard Bohm) collects the fee for each assignation; Lana von Meyerbeer (Y Sa Lo), a high-class hooker with shady connections and a penchant for knitting whom Walter is using, as he tells his wife, "for research on a book;" and a groveling groupie, Andrée (Margit Carstensen), who worships "the great poet" like a god. With so much turmoil, and nonstop sex, Walter's two-year stretch of writer's block is more than understandable: Where would he find the time? Suddenly one day, after unconsciously scribbling down a poem about an albatross, he imagines himself the reincarnation of its actual author, Stefan George, the nineteenth century gay German poet and aesthete. So taken with this "mystical" bond (which we see as an obvious case of unconscious plagiarism), the über-heterosexual Kranz acatually tries to become gay, like George. He even hires a circle of handsome young man – costumed in nineteenth century garb – to fawn over him, and a muscle-bound hustler to pose in a "classical" toga. Throughout the film, he is dogged by Lauf (Ulli Lommel), a detective investigating the murder of Irmgart von Witzleben (yet he is willing to stop his search when the Krantzes make him an offer he can't refuse: "I won't say no to a footbath!"), even as the wild bunch of characters surrounding Walter grows ever more manically out of control. The film climaxes with not one, not two, but three surprise endings, one of which is genuinely poignant, and the other two dead-on hilarious.

And, boy, are they ever surprises. And nudity, and violence, and madness in spades. So be warned: while it's plenty funny, it's also plenty disturbing. Here is the quotation from Antonin Artaud at the beginning of the movie: "What differentiates the heathens from us is the great resolve underlying all forms of belief not to think in human terms. In this way, they are able to retain the link with the whole of creation, in other words, with the godhead." Food for thought, anyway.

Catullus 75

2006-10-18T13:04:00.000-07:00

Huc est mens deducta tua mea, Lesbia, culpa
atque ita se officio perdidit ipsa suo,
ut iam nec bene velle queat tibi, si optima fias,
nec desistere amare, omnia si facias.

Blaise Says

2006-10-17T12:44:00.000-07:00

Jesus is the God whom we can approach without pride and before whom we can humble ourselves without despair.

I plucked a white hair today,

2006-10-16T12:37:00.001-07:00

right out of my, er... um... nostril. Man, I hate getting older. Time passing, the strangest of all things.

Sunday

2006-10-15T13:02:00.000-07:00

Little Red Studio

2006-10-14T12:57:00.000-07:00

"Picture an artist's atelier in Paris about 1880..."

Bigger Than Paper Towels

2006-10-13T14:09:00.000-07:00

While walking around Greenlake this morning,I walked past two older gents going in the opposite direction and in a deep discussion about ... something. The white haired guy turned to the the salt-and-pepper haired guy and said, "And so on the other side they had this theologian, real scum ... worse than a lawyer ..."

What a bummer.

Yesterday I was luckier. I saw a guy, probably about my age (41) reading Cinnamon Skin, one of the Travis McGee novels by John D. MacDonald. In the original cover, shiny gold (or cinnamon, I guess), which would be part of the reason I picked up that old Pocketbook Paperbacket of The Second Coming three or four years later. Here are a couple of nice excerpts I remember from MacDonald's book.

We all think of the inconvenience of making an effort. We're all going to do the right things a little later on. Soon. But soon slides by so easily. Then we vow we'll try to do better. We all carry that little oppressive weight around in the back of our mind -- that we should be living better, trying harder, but we're not. We're all living just about as well as we can at any given moment. But that doesn't stop the wishing.

Pretty good, isn't it? I don't think I've read anything in John Grisham that good. B list books were a lot better 25 years ago, I think. And then there was this:

Walking back through the mall to the exit nearest our part of the parking lot, we passed one shop which sold computers, printers, software, and games. It was packed with teenagers, the kind who wear wire rims and know what the new world is about. The clerks were indulgent, letting them program the computers. Two hundred yards away, near the six movie houses, a different kind of teenager shoved quarters into the space-war games, tensing over the triggers, releasing the eerie sounds of extraterrestrial combat. Any kid back in the computer store could have told the combatants that because there is no atmosphere in space, there is absolutely no sound at all. Perfect distribution: the future managers and the future managed ones. Twenty in the computer store, two hundred in the arcade.

The future managers have run on past us into the thickets of CP/M, M-Basic, Cobol, Fortran, Z-80, Apples, and Worms. Soon the bosses of the microcomputer revolution will sell us preprogrammed units for each household which will provide entertainment, print out news, purvey mail-order goods, pay bills, balance accounts, keep track of expenses, and compute taxes. But by then the future managers will be over on the far side of the thickets, dealing with bubble memories, machines that design machines, projects so esoteric our pedestrian minds cannot comprehend them. It will be the biggest revolution of all, bigger than the wheel, bigger than Franklin's kite, bigger than paper towels.

And yet I still couldn't keep myself out of the arcade.

St. Edward the Confessor

2006-10-13T14:01:00.000-07:00

Edward the Confessor was the son of King Ethelred III and his Norman wife, Emma, daughter of Duke Richard I of Normandy. He was born at Islip, England, and sent to Normandy with his mother in the year 1013 when the Danes under Sweyn and his son Canute invaded England. Canute remained in England and the year after Ethelred's death in 1016, married Emma, who had returned to England, and became King of England. Edward remained in Normandy, was brought up a Norman, and in 1042, on the death of his half-brother, Hardicanute, son of Canute and Emma, and largely through the support of the powerful Earl Godwin, he was acclaimed king of England. In 1044, he married Godwin's daughter Edith. His reign was a peaceful one characterized by his good rule and remission of odious taxes, but also by the struggle, partly caused by his natural inclination to favor the Normans, between Godwin and his Saxon supporters and the Norman barons, including Robert of Jumieges, whom Edward had brought with him when he returned to England and whom he named Archbishop of Canterbury in 1051. In the same year, Edward banished Godwin, who took refuge in Flanders but returned the following year with a fleet ready to lead a rebellion. Armed revolt was avoided when the two men met and settled their differences; among them was the Archbishop of Canterbury, which was resolved when Edward replaced Robert with Stigand, and Robert returned to Normandy. Edward's difficulties continued after Godwin's death in 1053 with Godwin's two sons: Harold who had his eye on the throne since Edward was childless, and Tostig, Earl of Northumbria. Tostig was driven from Northumbria by a revolt in 1065 and banished to Europe by Edward, who named Harold his successor. After this Edward became more interested in religious affairs and built St. Peter's Abbey at Westminster, the site of the present Abbey, where he is buried. His piety gained him the surname "the Confessor". He died in London on January 5, and he was canonized in 1161 by Pope Alexander III.

How You Found Quotidian Quintilian XIII

2006-10-12T11:23:00.000-07:00

Wow. I can't help but picture this poor soul, who, having dumped out a big dusty pile of d-CON over a piece of cheese in one of her (could be 'his') cupboards, has returned later in the day, only to find that the cheese and the poison are both all gone, with nothing but a trail of rat poop leading back into a dark corner of loose plywood.

Best of luck, 70.133.157.# in Plano, Texas.

Big Jon's Latin Assignment #2

2006-10-12T05:40:00.000-07:00

This is the poem I went over with a Latin student last night. Catullus 22 has always been one of my favorites, especially for the lines derecta plumbo et pumice omnia aequata and sed non videmus manticae quod tergo est. Big Jon did such an outstanding job of translating last week that I'm asking him to come back and make a go of this one.

Suffenus iste, Vare, quem probe nosti,
homo est venustus et dicax et urbanus,
idemque longe plurimos facit versus.
Puto esse ego illi milia aut decem aut plura
perscripta, nec sic ut fit in palimpsesto
relata: cartae regiae, novi libri,
novi umbilici, lora rubra, membranae,
derecta plumbo et pumice omnia aequata.
Haec cum legas tu, bellus ille et urbanus
suffenus unus caprimulgus aut fossor
rursus videtur: tantum abhorret ac mutat.
Hoc quid putemus esse? Qui modo scurra
aut si quid hac re scitius videbatur,
idem infaceto est infacetior rure,
simul poemata attigit, neque idem umquam
aeque est beatus ac poema cum scribit:
tam gaudet in se tamque se ipse miratur.
Nimirum idem omnes fallimur, neque est quisquam
quem non in aliqua re videre Suffenum
possis. Suus cuique attributus est error;
sed non videmus manticae quod tergo est.

Thanks, Jon!

L'italiana in Algeri

2006-10-11T11:59:00.000-07:00

Tonight I saw the dress rehearsal for the latest production at McCaw Hall and enjoyed it immensely. The immense Stephanie Blythe was excellent as Isabella, but I thought the real star of the show was William Burden as Lindoro, who shines from the moment he walks on stage and sings 'Languir per un bella'. Sally Wolf was very good as Elvira and and so was Simone Alberghini as the Mustafa, who does a kind of Islamofascist 'Springtime for Hitler' thing that's a bit hammy, but works well for the buffa quality of the opera. This particular production by Chris Alexander has already worked well in Santa Fe and San Francisco and went off here without a hitch. Setting the comedy in Algeria between the First and Second World Wars with airplanes and hot-air balloons instead of ships worked very well, and that they could begin with a burning plane flying over a Muslim country nicely flouts the pc sensitivity that saw Ideomeno cancelled in Germany a few weeks ago. That the subjugation of women and impaling of infidels by an Islamic autocrat can be played for gags in Seattle is not just a matter for laughing, but a reason for rejoicing.

Blaise Says

2006-10-10T13:56:00.000-07:00

Faith certainly tells us what the senses do not, but not the contrary of what they see; it is above, not against them.

Happy Columbus Day

2006-10-09T13:59:00.000-07:00

Regarding the painting (accessed through the title of the post), the commentary from the Web Gallery is as follows: "John Vanderlyn, an American whose revolutionary sympathies had led him to study and work in Paris in the early days of the empire, executed this painting in the American Capitol in Washington. His theme was Columbus Landing at Guanahani, 1492, glorifying the arrival on this West Indian island of the historical figure who was regarded as the founder of the white and Christian Americas. His Indians crouch like wild animals, frightened and puzzled, and some of the explorer's Spanish sailors crawl on the ground, already hunting for gold."

And it's hanging in the U.S. Capitol!

Jeff Jacoby on the Amish schoolhouse shooting.

2006-10-08T19:03:00.000-07:00

Over at Korrektiv I posted Rod Dreher's summation of the Amish response to the murder of three girls in a one room schoolhouse. Jeff Jacoby had an equally impassioned interpretation in today's Boston Globe:

But hatred is not always wrong, and forgiveness is not always deserved. I admire the Amish villagers' resolve to live up to their Christian ideals even amid heartbreak, but how many of us would really want to live in a society in which no one gets angry when children are slaughtered? In which even the most horrific acts of cruelty were always and instantly forgiven? There is a time to love and a time to hate, Ecclesiastes teaches. If anything deserves to be hated, surely it is the pitiless murder of innocents.

300

2006-10-07T12:20:00.000-07:00

is (hopefully) the next number in the series, as I pointed out to Angelmeg below. Coincidentally, it's also the name of a movie coming out next spring about the Battle of Thermopylae (view the trailer by clicking on the title above), which is covered extensively in this article at Wikipedia. The 300 Spartans, made in 1962, is also worth seeing some rainy day weekend.

St. Pardulphus

2006-10-06T18:26:00.000-07:00

(c. 728) A Benedictine abbot. Originally from Sardent, Gueret, Limoges, France, He entered the Benedictine monastery at Gueret and subsequently became its much respected abbot. According to tradition, Parduiphus remained behind and alone in the monastery during the onslaught of the Arabs across southern France. He supposedly won the safety of the monastery through his assiduous prayer.

How You Found Quotidian Quintilian XII

2006-10-05T22:10:00.000-07:00

Yep, I'm out now, although the dogs are closing in fast. Just looking for a hacksaw to get these leg irons off. Rufus and Henri aren't much help either; the sooner I ditch them, the better. I reckon.

2006-10-04T22:13:00.000-07:00

Blaise Says

2006-10-03T23:45:00.000-07:00

Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true.

Catullus 13

2006-10-02T22:27:00.000-07:00

Cenabis bene, mi Fabulle, apud me
paucis, si tibi di favent, diebus,
si tecum attuleris bonam atque magnam
cenam, non sine candida puella
et vino et sale et omnibus cachinnis.
Haec si, inquam, attuleris, venuste noster,
cenabis bene; nam tui Catulli
plenus sacculus est aranearum.
Sed contra accipies meros amores,
seu quid suavius elegantiusve est:
nam unguentum dabo, quod meae puellae
donarunt Veneres Cupidinesque;
quod tu cum olfacies, deos rogabis
totum ut te faciant, Fabulle, nasum.

114, 128, 138, 122

2006-10-01T11:33:00.000-07:00

There's nothing like consistency.

Listen to the Lion

2006-09-30T21:49:00.000-07:00

(b.331 d.420) St. Jerome, who was born Eusebius Hieronymous Sophronius, was the most learned of the Fathers of the Western Church. He was born about the year 342 at Stridonius, a small town at the head of the Adriatic, near the episcopal city of Aquileia. His father, a Christian, took care that his son was well instructed at home, then sent him to Rome, where the young man's teachers were the famous pagan grammarian Donatus and Victorinus, a Christian rhetorician. Jerome's native tongue was the Illyrian dialect, but at Rome he became fluent in Latin and Greek, and read the literatures of those languages with great pleasure. His aptitude for oratory was such that he may have considered law as a career. He acquired many worldly ideas, made little effort to check his pleasure-loving instincts, and lost much of the piety that had been instilled in him at home. Yet in spite of the pagan and hedonistic influences around him, Jerome was baptized by Pope Liberius in 360. He tells us that "it was my custom on Sundays to visit, with friends of my own age and tastes, the tombs of the martyrs and Apostles, going down into those subterranean galleries whose walls on both sides preserve the relics of the dead." Here he enjoyed deciphering the inscriptions.

After three years at Rome, Jerome's intellectual curiosity led him to explore other parts of the world. He visited his home and then, accompanied by his boyhood friend Bonosus, went to Aquileia, where he made friends among the monks of the monastery there, notably Rufinus. Then, still accompanied by Bonosus, he traveled to Treves, in Gaul. He now renounced all secular pursuits to dedicate himself wholeheartedly to God. Eager to build up a religious library, the young scholar copied out St. Hilary's books on and his Commentaries on the Psalms, and got together other literary and religious treasures. He returned to Stridonius, and later settled in Aquileia. The bishop had cleared the church there of the plague of Arianism and had drawn to it many eminent men. Among those with whom Jerome formed friendships were Chromatius (later canonized), to whom Jerome dedicated several of his works, Heliodorus (also to become a saint), and his nephew Nepotian. The famous theologian Rufinus, at first his close friend, afterward became his bitter opponent. By nature an irascible man with a sharp tongue, Jerome made enemies as well as friends. He spent some years in scholarly studies in Aquileia, then, in search of more perfect solitude, he turned towards the East. With his friends, Innocent, Heliodorus, and Hylas, a freed slave, he started overland for Syria. On the way they visited Athens, Bithynia, Galatia, Pontus, Cappadocia, and Cilicia.

The party arrived at Antioch about the year 373. There Jerome at first attended the lectures of the famous Apollinaris, bishop of Laodicea, who had not yet put forward his heresy1 With his companions he left the city for the desert of Chalcis, about fifty miles southeast of Antioch. Innocent and Hylas soon died there, and Heliodorus left to return to the West, but Jerome stayed for four years, which were passed in study and in the practice of austerity. He had many attacks of illness but suffered still more from temptation. "In the remotest part of a wild and stony desert," he wrote years afterwards to his friend Eustochium, "burnt up with the heat of the sun, so scorching that it frightens even the monks who live there, I seemed to myself to be in the midst of the delights and crowds of Rome.... In this exile and prison to which through fear of Hell I had voluntarily condemned myself, with no other company but scorpions and wild beasts, I many times imagined myself watching the dancing of Roman maidens as if I had been in the midst of them. My face was pallid with fasting, yet my will felt the assaults of desire. In my cold body and my parched flesh, which seemed dead before its death, passion was still able to live. Alone with the enemy, I threw myself in spirit at the feet of Jesus, watering them with my tears, and tamed my flesh by fasting whole weeks. I am not ashamed to disclose my temptations, though I grieve that I am not now what I then was."

Jerome added to these trials the study of Hebrew, a discipline which he hoped would help him in winning a victory over himself. "When my soul was on fire with wicked thoughts," he wrote in 411, "as a last resort, I became a pupil to a monk who had been a Jew, in order to learn the Hebrew alphabet. From the judicious precepts of Quintilian, the rich and fluent eloquence of Cicero, the graver style of Fronto, and the smoothness of Pliny, I turned to this language of hissing and broken-winded words. What labor it cost me, what difficulties I went through, how often I despaired and abandoned it and began again to learn, both I, who felt the burden, and they who lived with me, can bear witness. I thank our Lord that I now gather such sweet fruit from the bitter sowing of those studies." He continued to read the pagan classics for pleasure until a vivid dream turned him from them, at least for a time. In a letter he describes how, during an illness, he dreamed he was standing before the tribunal of Christ. "Thou a Christian?" said the judge skeptically. "Thou art a Ciceronian. Where thy treasure is, there thy heart is also."

The church at Antioch was greatly disturbed at this time by party and doctrinal disputes. The anchorites in the desert took sides, and called on Jerome, the most learned of them, to give his opinions on the subjects at issue. He wrote for guidance to Pope Damasus at Rome. Failing to receive an answer, he wrote again. "On one side, the Arian fury rages, supported by the secular power; on the other side, the Church (at Antioch) is being divided into three parts, and each would draw me to itself." No reply from Damasus is extant; but we know that Jerome acknowledged Paulinus, leader of one party, as bishop of Antioch, and that when he left the desert of Chalcis, he received from Paulinus' hands his ordination as priest. Jerome consented to ordination only on condition that he should not be obliged to serve in any church, knowing that his true vocation was to be a monk and recluse.

About 380 Jerome went to Constantinople to study the Scriptures under the Greek, Gregory of Nazianzus, then bishop of that city. Two years later he went back to Rome with Paulinus of Antioch to attend a council which Pope Damasus was holding to deal with the Antioch schism. Appointed secretary of the council, Jerome acquitted himself so well that, when it was over, Damasus kept him there as his own secretary. At the Pope's request he prepared a revised text, based on the Greek, of the Latin New Testament, the current version of which had been disfigured by "wrong copying, clumsy correction, and careless interpolations." He also revised the Latin psalter. That the prestige of Rome and its power to arbitrate between disputants, East as well as West, was recognized as never before at this time, was due in some measure at least to Jerome's diligence and ability. Along with his official duties he was fostering a new movement of Christian asceticism among a group of noble Roman ladies. Several of them were to be canonized, including Albina and her daughters Marcella and Asella, Melania the Elder, who was the first of them to go to the Holy Land, and Paula, with her daughters, Blesilla and Eustochium. The tie between Jerome and the three last-mentioned women was especially close, and to them he addressed many of his famous letters.

When Pope Damasus died in 384, he was succeeded by Siricius, who was less friendly to Jerome. While serving Damasus, Jerome had impressed all by his personal holiness, learning, and integrity. But he had also managed to get himself widely disliked by pagans and evil-doers whom he had condemned, and also by people of taste and tolerance, many of them Christians, who were offended by his biting sarcasm and a certain ruthlessness in attack. An example of his style is the harsh diatribe against the artifices of worldly women, who "paint their cheeks with rouge and their eyelids with antimony, whose plastered faces, too white for human beings, look like idols; and if in a moment of forgetfulness they shed a tear it makes a furrow where it rolls down the painted cheek; women to whom years do not bring the gravity of age, who load their heads with other people's hair, enamel a lost youth upon the wrinkles of age, and affect a maidenly timidity in the midst of a troop of grand children." In a letter to Eustochium he writes with scorn of certain members of the Roman clergy. "All their anxiety is about their clothes.... You would take them for bridegrooms rather than for clerics; all they think about is knowing the names and houses and doings of rich ladies."

Although Jerome's indignation was usually justified, his manner of expressing it-both verbally and in letters-aroused resentment. His own reputation was attacked; his bluntness, his walk, and even his smile were criticized. And neither the virtue of the ladies under his direction nor his own scrupulous behavior towards them was any protection from scandalous gossip. Affronted at the calumnies that were circulated, Jerome decided to return to the East. Taking with him his brother Paulinian and some others, he embarked in August, 385. At Cyprus, on the way, he was received with joy by Bishop Epiphanius, and at Antioch also he conferred with leading churchmen. It was here, probably, that he was joined by the widow Paula and some other ladies who had left Rome with the aim of settling in the Holy Land.

With what remained of Jerome's own patrimony and with financial help from Paula, a monastery for men was built near the basilica of the Nativity at Bethlehem, and also houses for three communities of women. Paula became head of one of these, and after her death was succeeded by her daughter Eustochium. Jerome himself lived and worked in a large cave near the Saviour's birthplace. He opened a free school there and also a hospice for pilgrims, "so that," as Paula said, "should Mary and Joseph visit Bethlehem again, they would have a place to stay." Now at last Jerome began to enjoy some years of peaceful activity. He gives us a wonderful description of this fruitful, harmonious, Palestinian life, and its attraction for all manner of men. "Illustrious Gauls congregate here, and no sooner has the Briton, so remote from our world, arrived at religion than he leaves his early-setting sun to seek a land which he knows only by reputation and from the Scriptures. Then the Armenians, the Persians, the peoples of India and Ethiopia, of Egypt, and of Pontus, Cappadocia, Syria, and Mesopotamia!... They come in throngs and set us examples of every virtue. The languages differ but the religion is the same; as many different choirs chant the psalms as there are nations.... Here bread and herbs, planted with our own hands, and milk, all country fare, furnish us plain and healthy food. In summer the trees give us shade. In autumn the air is cool and the falling leaves restful. In spring our psalmody is sweeter for the singing of the birds. We have plenty of wood when winter snow and cold are upon us. Let Rome keep its crowds, let its arenas run with blood, its circuses go mad, its theaters wallow in sensuality...."

But when the Christian faith was threatened Jerome could not be silent. While at Rome in the time of Pope Damasus, he had composed a book on the perpetual virginity of the Virgin Mary against one Helvidius, who had maintained that Mary had not remained always a virgin but had had other children by St. Joseph, after the birth of Christ. This and similar ideas were now again put forward by a certain Jovinian, who had been a monk. Paula's son-in-law, Pammachius, sent some of this heretical writing to Jerome, and he, in 393, wrote two books against Jovinian. In the first he described the excellence of virginity. The books were written in Jerome's vehement style and there were expressions in them which seemed lacking in respect for honorable matrimony. Pammachius informed Jerome of the offense which he and many others at Rome had taken at them. Thereupon Jerome composed his , sometimes called his third book against Jovinian, in which he showed by quoting from his own earlier works that he regarded marriage as a good and honorable state and did not condemn even a second or a third marriage.

A few years later he turned his attention to one Vigilantius, a Gallic priest, who was denouncing both celibacy and the veneration of saints' relics, calling those who revered them idolaters and worshipers of ashes. In defending celibacy Jerome said that a monk should purchase security by flying from temptations and dangers when he distrusted his own strength. As to the veneration of relics, he declared: "We do not worship the relics of the martyrs, but honor them in our worship of Him whose martyrs they are. We honor the servants in order that the respect paid to them may be reflected back to the Lord." Honoring them, he said, was not idolatry because no Christian had ever adored the martyrs as gods; on the other hand, they pray for us. "If the Apostles and martyrs, while still living on earth, could pray for other men, how much more may they do it after their victories? Have they less power now that they are with Jesus Christ?" He told Paula, after the death of her daughter Blesilla, "She now prays to the Lord for you, and obtains for me the pardon of my sins." Jerome was never moderate whether in virtue or against evil. Though swift to anger, he was also swift to feel remorse and was even more severe on his own failings than on those of others.

From 395 to 400 Jerome was engaged in a war against Origenism2, which unhappily created a breach in his long friendship with Rufinus. Finding that some Eastern monks had been led into error by the authority of Rufinus' name and learning, Jerome attacked him. Rufinus, then living in a monastery at Jerusalem, had translated many of Origen's works into Latin and was an enthusiastic upholder of his scholarship, though it does not appear that he meant to defend the heresies in Origen's writings. Augustine, bishop of Hippo, was one of the churchmen greatly distressed by the quarrel between Jerome and Rufinus, and became unwillingly involved in a controversy with Jerome.

Jerome's passionate controversies were the least important part of his activities. What has made his name so famous was his critical labor on the text of the Scriptures. The Church regards him as the greatest of all the doctors in clarifying the Divine Word. He had the best available aids for such an undertaking, living where the remains of Biblical places, names, and customs all combined to give him a more vivid view than he could have had at a greater distance. To continue his study of Hebrew he hired a famous Jewish scholar, Bar Ananias, who came to teach him by night, lest other Jews should learn of it. As a man of prayer and purity of heart whose life had been mainly spent in study, penance, and contemplation, Jerome was prepared to be a sensitive interpreter of spiritual things.

We have seen that already while at Rome he had made a revision of the current Latin New Testament, and of the Psalms. Now he undertook to translate most of the books of the Old Testament directly from the Hebrew. The friends and scholars who urged him to this task realized the superiority of a version made directly from the original to any second-hand version, however venerable. It was needed too for argument with the Jews, who recognized no other text as authentic but their own. He began with the Books of Kings, and went on with the rest at different times. When he found that the Book of Tobias and part of Daniel had been composed in Chaldaic, he set himself to learn that difficult language also. More than once he was tempted to give up the whole wearisome task, but a certain scholarly tenacity of purpose kept him at it. The only parts of the Latin Bible, now known as the Vulgate, which were not either translated or worked over by him are the Books of Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, and the two Books of the Maccabees.3 He revised the Psalms once again, with the aid of Origen's ,4 and the Hebrew text. This last is the version included now in the Vulgate and used generally in the Divine Office; his first revision, known as the Roman Psalter, is still used for the opening psalm at Matins and throughout the Missal, and for the Divine Office in the cathedrals of St. Peter at Rome and St. Mark at Venice, and in the Milanese rite.

In the sixteenth century the great Council of Trent pronounced Jerome's Vulgate the authentic and authoritative Latin text of the Catholic Church, without, however, thereby implying a preference for it above the original text or above versions in other languages. In 1907 Pope Pius X entrusted to the Benedictine Order the office of restoring as far as possible the correct text of St. Jerome's Vulgate, which during fifteen centuries of use had naturally become altered in many places. The Bible now ordinarily used by English-speaking Catholics is a translation of the Vulgate, made at Rheims and Douay towards the end of the sixteenth century, and revised by Bishop Challoner in the eighteenth. The Confraternity Edition of the New Testament appearing in 1950 represents a complete revision.

A heavy blow came to Jerome in 404 when his staunch friend, the saintly Paula, died. Six years later he was stunned by news of the sacking of Rome by Alaric the Goth. Of the refugees who fled from Rome to the East at this time he wrote: "Who would have believed that the daughters of that mighty city would one day be wandering as servants and slaves on the shores of Egypt and Africa, or that Bethlehem would daily receive noble Romans, distinguished ladies, brought up in wealth and now reduced to beggary? I cannot help them all, but I grieve and weep with them, and am completely absorbed in the duties which charity imposes on me. I have put aside my commentary on Ezekiel and almost all study. For today we must translate the precepts of the Scriptures into deeds; instead of speaking saintly words, we must act them." A few years later his work was again interrupted by raids of barbarians pushing north through Egypt into Palestine, and later still by a violent onset of Pelagian heretics, who, relying on the protection of Bishop John of Jerusalem, sent a troop of ruffians to Bethlehem to disperse the monks and nuns living there under the direction of Jerome, who had been opposing Pelagianism5 with his customary truculence. Some of the monks were beaten, a deacon was killed, and monasteries were set on fire. Jerome had to go into hiding for a time.

The following year Paula's daughter Eustochium died. The aged Jerome soon fell ill, and after lingering for two years succumbed. Worn with penance and excessive labor, his sight and voice almost gone, his body like a shadow, he died peacefully on September 30, 420, and was buried under the church of the Nativity at Bethlehem. In the thirteenth century his body was translated and now lies somewhere in the Sistine Chapel of the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore at Rome. The Church owes much to St. Jerome. While his great work was the Vulgate, his achievements in other fields are valuable; to him we owe the distinction between canonical and apocryphal writings; he was a pioneer in the field of Biblical archeology, his commentaries are important; his letters, published in three volumes, are one of our best sources of knowledge of the times.

St. Jerome has been a popular subject with artists, who have pictured him in the desert, as a scholar in his study, and sometimes in the robes of a cardinal, because of his services for Pope Damasus; often too he is shown with a lion, from whose paw, according to legend, he once drew a thorn. Actually this story was transferred to him from the tradition of St. Gerasimus, but a lion is not an inappropriate symbol for so fearless a champion of the faith. (from the Catholic Encyclopediia)

Here are a few works of art dedicated to St. Jerome:

Hieronymus Bosch, Antonello da Messina, Albrecht Durer, Leonardo Da Vinci, Joachim Patinier, Marco Meloni, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Jan van Eyck, Jacopo Bassano, Juan de Valdes Leal, Jean Jacques Nuel, St. Jerome Praying, Stefan Lochner, H. Steenwick, Caravaggio, Giovanni Bellini, Jusepe De Ribera?, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Unknown, Georges de La Tour, Eyck,Colantonio, Piero della Francesca, Bellini, Niccoló di Liberatore da Foligno, Peter Paul Rubens, Masaccio, Pietro Vannucci, Theoderich, Manuscript Illumination, Unknown, Carpaccio, Albrecht Durer, Unknown, Perugino,Letter

For Travelers, Doctors, Blind Persons, the Cable Guy, Grocers, Sailers, Paratroopers, Cops and Patients

2006-09-29T10:09:00.000-07:00

St. Raphael is one of seven Archangels who stand before the throne of the Lord. He was sent by God to help Tobit, Tobiah and Sarah. At the time, Tobit was blind and Tobiah's betrothed, Sarah, had had seven bridegrooms perish on the night of their weddings. Raphael accompanied Tobiah into Media disguised as a man named Azariah. Raphael helped him through his difficulties and taught him how to safely enter marriage with Sarah. Tobiah said that Raphael caused him to have his wife and that he gave joy to Sarah's parents for driving out the evil spirit in her. He also gave Raphael credit for his father's seeing the light of heaven and for receiving all good things through his intercession. Besides Raphael, Michael and Gabriel are the only Archangels mentioned by name in the bible. Raphael's name means "God heals." This identity came about because of the biblical story which claims that he "healed" the earth when it was defiled by the sins of the fallen angels in the apocryphal book of Enoch. Raphael is also identified as the angel who moved the waters of the healing sheep pool. He is also the patron of the blind, of happy meetings, of nurses, of physicians and of travelers.

The name Gabriel means "man of God," or "God has shown himself mighty." It appears first in the prophesies of Daniel in the Old Testament. The angel announced to Daniel the prophecy of the seventy weeks. His name also occurs in the apocryphal book of Henoch. He was the angel who appeared to Zachariah to announce the birth of St. John the Baptizer. Finally, he announced to Mary that she would bear a Son Who would be conceived of the Holy Spirit, Son of the Most High, and Saviour of the world. The feast day is September 29th. St. Gabriel is the patron of communications workers.

The name Michael signifies "Who is like to God?" and was the warcry of the good angels in the battle fought in heaven against satan and his followers. Holy Scripture describes St. Michael as "one of the chief princes," and leader of the forces of heaven in their triumph over the powers of hell. He has been especially honored and invoked as patron and protector by the Church from the time of the Apostles. Although he is always called "the Archangel," the Greek Fathers and many others place him over all the angels - as Prince of the Seraphim. St. Michael is the patron of grocers, mariners, paratroopers, police and sickness.

Gideon's Blog

2006-09-29T10:01:00.000-07:00

has to be the most insightful one-man blog on the web. Maybe the most insightful, period. I think I may have mentioned it before, but it's time I mentioned it again. The author, Noah, weighs in on everything from national policy issues to personal philanthropy projects to his Rosh Hashanah menu. Today he has a very thoughtful post about the torture bill, especially these two paragraphs:

First, I'm against the torture bill, strongly. The specific techniques that Andrew Sullivan never tires of talking about - waterboarding, stress positions, hypothermia - are plainly tortures. They are "civilized" tortures in that they do not cause permanent physical harm; indeed, I've read that CIA operatives trained to apply waterboarding practice the technique on each other, which they would certainly not do if they were being trained to rip out fingernails. But they are plainly tortures, in that they are designed to cause pain and suffering, and break the prisoner by making him desperate to end that suffering. That's torture.

I'm not convinced that we need to go down this road. I'm very persuaded, in particular, by the argument that by formally legalizing such procedures, you will inevitably make them routine. That's certainly what happened in Israel when "moderate physical pressure" became part of the Shin Bet's arsenal. And while I'm both skeptical of making human rights the centerpiece of our diplomacy and generally indifferent to bien pensant opinion in Europe, formally endorsing torture by the CIA is going to alienate lots of people who are our natural allies, not only people who are already disposed to be our enemies.

Well supported, well reasoned; his writing here and everywhere strikes me as the very essence of sanity.

Artificial Happiness: The Dark Side of the New Happy Class

2006-09-28T23:50:00.000-07:00

is the book I'm reading now. Author Ronald W. Dworkin takes aim at a number of different trends in American society, most significantly the "staggering rise in antidepressant medications," to quote the dust jacket, but also the fitness craze and the vacuity of modern religious practice. My first question going in was, what does the author mean, exactly, by 'artificial' happiness? We're all gonna die, there's not a damn thing we can do about it, and isn't all happiness therefore 'artificial'? Perhaps 'fleeting' is closer to what I'm thinking of, but believe me, if I find some artificial happiness, I'm grabbing some of that, too. Anyway, here is what the author writes about his title:

What exactly is Artificial Happiness? John Green, a man I met during the writing of this book, is a good example of someone who feels it.

A thirty-five-year-old lawyer, John fights constantly with his wife over money. He won't divorce her because he fears losing custody of their young son. In the past, he tried Valium to relax, but the drug made him drowsy. Once, an associate phoned on a case. John's wife fielded the call, made excuses, and then screamed, "You can't talk to him! He's already taken his pill!" John finally found relief through Prozac, which lets him live happily inside his loveless marriage. He expects to be on Prozac for years, until his son grows up (and he can leave his wife), or maybe even longer, ssince by the time his son is grown John will have built up a nest egg that his wife would grab in any divorce.

Although John Green's life is miserable, his mind is happy. His life and mind are out of synch: he enjoys Artificial Happiness.

Maybe John Green can get that divorce and Dworkin can include him in his next book about the staggering problems created by divorce in our country. On the whole, I didn't find many of these anecdotes very persuasive. I like the thesis, but the stories of individuals refusing to struggle with their problems were often so sketchy that I couldn't help but wonder about other contributing factors.

Dworkin goes on to write that the most significant problem with Artificial Happiness is that it is being foisted upon younger and younger children, and this does not bode well for the future. Probably true. I know I'm thankful for my wretched childhood, and it's just too damn bad that future generations will be robbed of their chance at misery. It's a great character builder, Redemptive Suffering. Although I've also worked with several students who were able to make positive changes in their lives because they were able to develop some psychological distance from their problems with the help of psychotropic medications. But who knows? Maybe life will come crashing down on them later. It usually does. But by then Lilly and Merck and all the others will have developed other drugs for those problems, so it's probably okay. Perhaps we should just cut to the chase and develop synthetic soma. Then we'd be done with these tiresome discussions.

Anyway, what I've read so far is pretty good, but not great. I was persuaded to read it by Richard John Neuhaus' comments in First Things and an article by Stanley Kurtz in National Review. I'll press on, but so far the articles are better than the book itself.

Six thick thistle sticks. Six thick thistles stick.

2006-09-28T21:43:00.000-07:00

How You Found Quotidian Quintilian XI

2006-09-27T00:01:00.000-07:00

Looking for a squidshell table? We got 'em. One, anyway, mentioned in a quotation from Caroline Coleman O'Neill's novel, Loving Soren. We hope that 213.84.167 from Barneveld, Gelderland found what he or she was looking for, and we also hope that Ms. O'Neill appreciates yet one more Google hit on her name. In case you're looking, Ms. O'Neill, Hello!

Blaise Says

2006-09-26T00:49:00.000-07:00

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.

Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich

2006-09-25T23:46:00.000-07:00

born this day in 1906. For a sample of his Cello Sonata as performed by Victor Uzur, follow this link.

Auden on Freud

2006-09-25T00:01:00.000-07:00

After reading about all those French psychiatrists I feel a definite need to reinstall some Auden as a way of grounding myself with respect to psychology. I came across these comments made in the 1930's or 40's, I believe as part of a newspaper column he wrote under the name 'Didymus.'

Pleasure. The error of Freud and most psychologists is making pleasure a negative thing, progress towards a state of rest. This is only one half of pleasure and the least important half. Creative pleasure is, like pain, an increase in tension. What does the psychologist make of contemplation and joy?

The essence of creation is doing things for no reason; it is pointless. Possessive pleasure is always rational. Freud really believes that pleasure in immoral, i.e., happiness is displeasing to God.

If you believe this, of course, the death-wish becomes the most important emotion, and the 'reinstatement of the earlier condition'. Entropy is another name for despair.

Whatever his pronouncements may have sometimes lacked in fine distinctions, their force is extremely compelling and their general effect sobering. It's as if he is constantly saying, "Let us be sane now."

The Proposition

2006-09-24T22:50:00.000-07:00

Easily the best Australian western since Quigley Down Under. Maybe it's better than Quigley Down Under. Mike and Charlie Burns (Richard Wilson and Guy Pearce) are captured by Captain Stanley and his British cohorts. Mike is a simpleton, but Capt. Stanley forces Charley to make a deal: Go into the Outback and hunt down the real bad apple of the family, Arthur Burns, bring him back, and then both Charlie and Mike can go free. In the meantime, Mike will sit in jail as collaterol.

Why is Arthur such a bad apple? He and his gang slaughtered a family (18th century-looking stills of the scene are shown during the opening credits), and the group is so wild that the Aborigines believe he is able to shape shift into a wild dog. Actually, he just looks like a wild dog.

This movie has some beautiful cinematography, and much of it depicts some of the most violent scenes I've seen in ages. Or at least they're brutally realistic in a way that Saw II, for example, is not. Unlike Saw II, The Proposition is quite good at showing how civilized society is built upon violence, and that the demand for blood satisfaction runs deeper than we are usually willing to admit.

A Cock-Eyed Comedy

2006-09-23T23:30:00.000-07:00

by Juan Goytisolo is the book I just finished reading. Very, very ... uh ... flamboyant. A purposeful and yet confusing narrative that pits Father Trennes (aka Friar Buego) against the author in a contest for authorial superiority. This contests seems (it's hard to tell) to jump from one era to the next as Father Trennes (er, maybe the author?) transmigrates from one subversive author to the next. Writers as diverse as Sterne and de Sade are invoked in championing what he calls his "textual libido", which here seems most evident in the ribald recollection of assignations in Marrakesh, London, and Istanbul. Those are the places I remember, anyway. At some point the author, or one of the authors, pens this little ditty:

It's a total hodge-podge !
No narrative coherence whatsoever !
The structure's contrived, a pastiche !
Hallucinating self-infatuation !
More dithyrambs to machos and hirsute yokels !
That old inane onanist song !
No dramatic progression.
A circular, reptitive text.

Pretty well sums it up. Details of everything from curtains to shoes to Morrocan manliness is sumptuously, I should say gorgeously described, which in itself was almost enough to slow me down enough to follow the labrinthine plot. Almost.

St. Thomas of Villanueva

2006-09-22T12:34:00.000-07:00

(c. 1555) Augustinian bishop. Born at Fuentellana, Castile, Spain, he was the son of a miller. He studied at the University of Alcala, earned a licentiate in theology, and became a professor there at the age of twenty-six. He declined the chair of philosophy at the university of Salamanca and instead entered the Augustinian Canons in Salamanca in 1516. Ordained in 1520, he served as prior of several houses in Salamanca, Burgos, and Valladolid, as provincial ofAndal usia and Castile, and then court chaplain to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (r. 1519-1556). During his time as provincial of Castile, he dispatched the first Augustinian missionaries to the New World. They subsequently helped evangelize the area of modern Mexico. He was offered but declined the see of Granada, but accepted appointment as archbishop of Valencia in 1544. As the see had been vacant for nearly a century, Thomas devoted much effort to restoring the spiritual and material life of the archdiocese. He was also deeply committed to the needs of the poor. He held the post of grand almoner of the poor, founded colleges for the children of new converts and the poor, organized priests for service among the Moors, and was renowned for his personal saintliness and austerities. While he did not attend the sessions of the Council of Trent, he was an ardent promoter of the Tridentine reforms throughout Spain. ~ catholic.org (painting by Bartolomé Estéban Murillo)

#500

2006-09-22T12:20:00.000-07:00

That's the number of posts here at QQ in just under two years. That's not once a day, but it's pretty damn good. Or pretty damn awful, depending on how you look at it. Go ahead and count 'em!

Mama Roma

2006-09-22T00:25:00.000-07:00

Pier Paolo Pasolini's second film has all the earmarks of a great film. It is beautifully framed thoughout and extremely well acted by Anna Magnani (Mama Roma) and Ettore Garofolo (Ettore). The opening sequence is one of the funniest, most brilliant beginnings I've ever seen; Mama Roma attends the wedding of her ex-lover, Carmine, and engages the betrothed couple in a contest of singing insults at one another. There are a number of other episodes that are nothing short of breathtaking: shots of Mama Roma walking the streets at night and Ettore slumming around ancient ruins with his fellow delinquents are as poignant as anything I've seen at the movies.

The film has some unfortunate failings, however; most of these come down to a forced combination of Freudianism and Catholicism that throws an overwrought, ideological wedge between the characters and what are intended to be the most emotive moments in the film. For example, the beginning of the scene of Momma and Ettore dancing is quite touching, but the Oedipal sensuality forced into some of the close shots detracts from what could have been a simpler and more touching portrait of a mother and her maturing son. This is highlighted by a later scene in which Ettore is shown practicing the cha-cha on his own, which seemed to me to have much more true feeling. Likewise, the portrayal of Ettore's suffering towards the end is so heavily symbolic that it jars the viewer from the story as it actually unfolds.

The Marxist vision I'd heard about in Pasolini's films failed to materialize, and there was nothing in the extended sequences of barren urban landscapes that struck me as Commie propaganda. The Christian Democratic Party, for all its faults, gave rise to the economic conditions that set the pace for much of the construction we see in the background of the film, and the destitute conditions in which the characters live out their drama seem more the products of petty criminal action than capitalist pigs. Certainly there is exploitation of some people by other people, but a movie in which the sole business owner is played for a dupe and a fifty year old whore starts selling fruit instead of sex just doesn't work as an attack on capitalism.

Overall a very fine movie with moments of greatness. The entire cast is great, and despite some heavy handed symbolism, all the major performances are indeed major. Pasolini's tracking shots are masterful and the unforced still shots are also very fine. Most of all, there's an earthiness, or maybe a salt-of-the-earthiness in the expressions of the Magnani, Garofolo and the others that makes this a movie well worth seeing.

The Self Between

2006-09-21T13:11:00.000-07:00

The Self Between: From Freud to the New Social Psychology of France is the name of the book I just finished reading. It's by Eugene Webb, whom I have elsewhere referred to as "Kierkegirard" when I wrote about another book of his called Philosophers of Consciousness. In that earlier book he did a masterful job of summarizing and integrating the work of such philosophers as Eric Voeglin, Bernard Lonergan, Michael Polanyi, and especially Girard and Kierkegaard, both of whom Webb recommends (as I see it) as thinkers offering the possibility of a new view consciousness because of the attention paid by each to the demands of desire upon it.

In The Self Between he takes this thesis a little further in his study of the role of sacrifice in the development of consciousness and the way it can both bind and liberate desire. The binding and liberation of desire would seem a natural subject for psychology, so it is certainly a natural progression that Webb would take up this subject in his next book, as indeed he has here. The difficulty with this progression is that the study of psychology (even when taken together with her chubby sister, sociology, as the psychiatrist Jean-Michel Oughourlian perceptively recommends) leads back to a reconsideration of the acting, thinking individual. As Webb himself notes in the last chapter:

What sort of functioning and consciousness, then, would be involved in the constitution of such an existential subject? To address this question fuly wold mean not only ot go beyond the psychological explorations considered in the present book but to commence a whole new one. As it is, however, this was the focus of my previous book, Philosophers of Consciousness, so I will limit myself to summarizing briefly some of the ideas on this topic discussed there...

If this progression summons the image of a snake swallowing its own tail, this is due to the interdependent bonds formed between philosophy and psychology/sociology in the constant search for transcendent and elusive ideals such as truth and "reality". A study of the dynamics involved in this constant search is invaluable.

Among the French thinkers taken up in The Self Between are François Roustang, Marie Balmary, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, and of course Jean-Michel Oughourlian. The first three are known for their critiques of Freud (and Lacan, his heir in the French tradition of psychoanalysis), while Oughourlian is most recognized for developing of the concept of the interdividual (a theory of psychology, in his own words, "unencumbered by any sort of biologism"), as well as his co-authoship of Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World with Girard.

And somehow it always seems to get back to the Great Dane. I'll leave the last words to Professor Webb, from Chapter 7: From Psychology to Philosophy of Consciousness:

Commenting on the symbolism of the sacrificial knife that Solmon calls for to cut the child in two, [Balmary] says that it differentiates and separates the doubles as it cuts through the ties with which the false mother had tried to bind the child to her. A true mother, she says, is one "who loves her child more than what ties the child to her. . . . the word of truth comes from the mother who agrees to let the knife pass between her child and herself" (p.98), just as Abraham attains to tue fatherhood when he is able to make a sacrifice of his intended sacrifice of Isaac and therby also becomes a true "I" in relation to a true "thou."

Whether such self-transcendence and sacrifice lead to death or to life, to the end of possibilities or to an opening toward unlimited possibilities, however, is not a question for psychology or finally even for philosophy. This is a question that calls not for an opinion but for a commitment - for dedication and a willingness to risk the meaning of one's life for the sake of something unknown. It is a question that leads beyond all abstraction and all theory into what Erikson called "basic trust" and Kierkegaard "faith."

Variations on a Theme by Hayden

2006-09-20T21:38:00.000-07:00

Wikipedia says: The Variations on a Theme by Joseph Haydn, consisting of a theme in B-flat major, eight variations and a finale, were composed in 1873 by Johannes Brahms. Recent scholarship has revealed that, despite the title of the work, the theme is very unlikely to be by Haydn.It was published in two versions: the variations for two pianos, written first but designated Op. 56b, and the same piece for orchestra, referred to as Op. 56a.

The theme begins with a repeated ten-measure passage which itself consists of two intriguing five-measure phrases, a quirk that is likely to have caught Brahms's attention. Almost without exception, the eight variations follow the phrasal structure of the theme and, though less strictly, the harmonic structure as well. Each has a distinctive character, several calling to mind the forms and techniques of earlier eras, with some displaying a mastery of counterpoint seldom encountered in Romantic music. The finale is a magnificent passacaglia, itself a theme and variations on a ground bass, five measures in length, derived from the principal theme.

If you and some of your friends would like to try playing it yourself, here is the complete score for the orchestral version.

Blaise Saise

2006-09-19T14:11:00.000-07:00

Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.

I got a bird that whistles

2006-09-18T23:32:00.000-07:00

The Lay of the Land

2006-09-18T09:59:00.000-07:00

Wow. A new Richard Ford novel, and a Frank Bascombe story at that. This one comes out about a month from now, and I've already got mine on pre-order. All I can say is, Thank God this is coming out a month before the Pynchon novel. Man, I feel like I'm 23 years old again. The Sportswriter changed my life when I first read it back in 1987. Probably for the worse, but the point is, it changed. Who knows? Maybe I'll find my way out of this fog I'm in as Frank finds his way out of his. Does Richard Ford belong in the same group as Pynchon, Don B, and WP? Yep, Yeah, for me he does, absolutely. This really does look like the best one yet.

New Haruki Murakami Novel

2006-09-18T09:50:00.000-07:00

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: Now that is a great title. Everybody's favorite Japanese novelist has a new book out too, and a lot of Amazon.com reviewers are giving it five stars. It actually came out in June, and somehow I missed it in the deluge of Philip Roth and John Updike. Anyway, I'm looking forward to reading this one, too. If you haven't read Wind-Up Bird Chronicles or The Elephant Vanishes, you should definitely check those out as well. Elephant is a collection of short stories, so that's a good place to start.

Thomas Pynchon on Sloth

2006-09-18T09:33:00.000-07:00

Evidently there are some big Pynhon fans down at Pomona College, where they have assembled many of his uncollected works (book reviews, introductions, essays, and even some of his work as a technical writer). This essay on Sloth and one writer's relation to this deadly sin is great stuff. Here's a sample:

IN his classical discussion of the subject in the "Summa Theologica," Aquinas termed Sloth, or acedia, one of the seven capital sins. He said he was using "capital" to mean "primary" or "at the head of" because such sins gave rise to others, but there was an additional and darker sense resonating luridly just beneath and not hurting the power of his argument, for the word also meant "deserving of capital punishment." Hence the equivalent term "mortal," as well as the punchier English "deadly."

But come on, isn't that kind of extreme, death for something as lightweight as Sloth? Sitting there on some medieval death row, going, "So, look, no offense, but what'd they pop you for anyway?"

"Ah, usual story, they came around at the wrong time of day, I end up taking out half of some sheriff's unit with my two-cubit crossbow, firing three-quarter-inch bolts on auto feed. Anger, I guess.... How about you?"

"Um, well ... it wasn't anger...."

"Ha! Another one of these Sloth cases, right?"

". . fact, it wasn't even me."

"Never is, slugger -- say, look, it's almost time for lunch. You wouldn't happen to be a writer, by any chance?

For all you Donald Barthelme fans (I certainly am, and for the Walker Percy fans, Walker Percy was one too, so you should be too), there's also this fine introduction to a collection of Barthelme odds and ends.

And did you know that Mr. Pynchon has a new book coming out? You can preorder it here. Pynchon himself wrote the following synopsis:

Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.

With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.

The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx.

As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it's their lives that pursue them.

Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they're doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.

Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck.

I still haven't made it through Mason & Dixon yet, but I will. Although this one looks better. I think I'll read it first, and rekindle my adoricism for one of the truly, truly greats of our times. Write up there with Don B and WP.

Fitzcarraldo

2006-09-18T00:32:00.000-07:00

Finally saw this German epic about an opera fanatic determined to build an opera house deep in the jungles of Peru. He wants this so bad that he promises a pet pig that he'll have a red velvet chair to sit and watch it from. First he tries to raise the money by becoming the only ice maker in the country. Then he decides he's going to harvest rubber. For this he needs to buy an old steamship, fix it up, then sail it up the Amazon river. He christens the ship Molly after his girlfriend, who runs a brothel and helps finance his mad schemes. When he goes as far as he can, he finds out that he's up shit creek with a paddleboat. At least it looks like a paddleboat. Out of the surrounding jungle come the natives, who are known to have killed missionaries and seem to be threatening to kill again. Fitzcarraldo plays his collection of Caruso phonograph records on the top deck of the ship and convinces the indians that instead of killing him, they should help tow his boat over a mountain to get to a river going downstream on the other side. Which they do. Fitzcarraldo makes it back to civilization, hires an opera company to play on the Molly, which has now been transformed into the opera house of his dreams. I guess I just gave the whole thing away. I first saw the previews to this movie 25 years ago, and I've been wanting to see it ever since. My life is now complete.

日本のレッスン

2006-09-17T12:44:00.000-07:00

Years ago I taught English in Japan. Along the way, I lived with a family and tried to learn Nihongo, but without very much success. If I'd had instruction like this, maybe I would have learned more.