Jene Chapter 6.2

So, one of the most important people in my entire life has finally gotten a blog! ...And is really grumpy about it, too. So, you know, you could go allay him by reading and responding, because then maybe he won't forget about it in like a week like his last attempt at blogging.

Anyway, I had the privilege of having Trent Dougherty (who was out stooping his massive intellect to teaching high school by some sort of interstellar accident) for a Medieval & Rennaissance Lit class, British Lit class, Great Ideas in Moral Philosophy class, and Latin 4 class. All in one year. And ever since then, I've had the privilege of having him as a really close friend and spiritual advisor-type. (He thinks he's Gandalf because of the goatee.)

At any rate, a lot of you have been present while I've talked to him broadcast live from maritini bars in Kentucky and stuff, (or talked to him yourself for hours if you happen to be Zach), so go check him out, and things.

Oh, and have a happy New Year while you're at it.

...Ryan, one of these days, I'm going to return your call, I swear it. I've never been called on Christmas Day before and the darling impropriety of it brought tears to my eyes! Sniff, sniff.

Also, I have a couple of pictures of Keren on my hard drive, if you're not happy with John's photography skillz and want me to send them along. Uh, edit: I actually don't know where my laptop is. I went to go get it and realized, hey, I didn't bring it home! Which made me wonder, uh, where is it anyway? And now I can't remember. PANICK!!!!

Gotta Love Revisionist Historians

This looks like a must read and a very important contribution to the oft-discussed (on this blog at least) "opposition" between the Church and Science.

Tops of 2005 In No Particular Order (maybe)

Albums - they don't necessarily have to have come out this year. basically, what I spent most time listening to.
1. Come on Feel the Illinoise! - Sufjan Stevens
2. Hail to the Thief - Radiohead
3. Seven Swans - Sufjan
4. Picaresque - The Decemberists
5. The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou Soundtrack (featuring Seu Jorge, Mark Mothersbaugh, and David Bowie)

Songs - listened to most this year
1. A Wolf at the Door - Radiohead
2. John Wayne Gacy, Jr. - Sufjan
3. Is there Life on Mars? - David Bowie
4. The Mariners Revenge Song - The Decemberists
5. You and Whose Army? - Radiohead

Books - read this year
1. The Everlasting Man - Chesterton
2. Catch-22 - Heller
3. The Confessions - Augustine
4. What's Wrong With the World - Chesterton
5. Brighton Rock - Graham Greene

Movies - saw this year
1. The Life Aquatic
2. The Passion of Joan of Arc
3. Eternal Sunshine
4. Citizen Kane
5. American History X

Events
1. Baby Sister
2. Beginning of ITU
3. Cross Country Disaster
4. At Least 10 Trips to LAX with Kathleen
5. Jene Participating

I'm definitely missing some things.

This is a Movie Un-Recommendation

Really Scarring Thing #4397: Watching Nathan Lane prostitute himself to about three hundred old women and thinking to yourself, “…Is it just me, or is his voice really familiar…?” OMG TIMON IS A DIRTY OLD MAN!!!

In case you can’t tell, this is a recommendation to not see The Producers, even if you’re completely innocent and it’s late at night and you get in free and miss the first fifteen minutes. Or, if you do, at least have the guts to walk out (like I didn’t).

Peggy Noonan

On immigration. She's filled with right-headed common sense, but can also express clearly what so many people confusedly think.

A Shameless Plug

And rightly so for this talented friend o' mine and his crew.

Thoughts on Economics: The First

I've begun reading an apparently influential book called Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt. I'm planning on posting a few thoughts from the book itself or provoked by it. I know at least a few readers are aspiring economists do feel free to contribute.

"The inherent difficulties of the subject would be great enough in any case, but they are multiplied a thousandfold by a factor that is insignificant in, say, physics, mathematics or medicine - the special pleading of selfish interests." p. 15

A Conversation

jhp: there's a lot of money in drugs
jene: And then my parents would be SO thrilled! Catholic AND a life of crime!
jhp: well, if you can keep your nose out of the snow, then you'd be doing very well for yourself. have you seen scarface?
jene: haha, no.
jhp: he couldn't stay away from his own supply. that's what brought him down.
jene: Look, I don't even like tylenol.
jhp: well that's good! cocaine, however, kindof tastes like sugar and it gives you a ridiculous high. unlike tylenol
jene: Do we speak from experience? (particularly liquid tylenol)
jhp: well, it kind of looks like sugar, powdered sugar.
jene: Oh,now we're backing off.
jhp: all i'm saying is, if it has the same physical properties, that it must be of the same element
jene: Sugar isn't an element.
jhp: look sister. i didn't come here to turn atheists into believers. we all know that white is a fundamental property of substantial body as it's a sensation of sight, so, cogito ergo sum, it's symbological of an element, aka, for you.
jene: So are snow and crack the same thing? Because that is WAY contrary to sense experience.
jhp: no, well, mayube. have you ever snorted it or injected it?
jene: I've gotten it up my nose, if that's what you mean.
jhp: not quite. it has to enter your brain
jene: John. I'm pretty sure it's water.
jhp: well, how do you know crazck isn't?
jene: It's powder.
jhp: snow isnt? look, you might actually be right, but i need to know for sure.
jene: How about you try it out.
jhp: well that's why i need to know

Love is Patient

A friend once "...wondered why Paul listed patience first in his definition of love in 1 Cor 13." He said that it "sounds contraversial, but to follow Christ is to suffer and die." OK. So what relation has patience to suffering and death?

I had never seen nor heard the connection before, yet it seems so obvious now. Why would patience be the first thing Paul says love is? Surely it was not unintentional. It is true, to follow Christ is to pick up one's cross - there's no denying that. But does that require patience?

Think of any time you've tried to instruct someone. It felt as though you couldn't make the answer - the way - any more obvious, and yet the student often failed. How easy it is to get frustrated in such situations! Well, imagine the infinite frustration that God would feel as a result of all of mankind bumbling about through life while the answer is everywhere in front of them. The infinite frustration, that is, that God would feel had he not infinite patience. Just as the teacher is often tempted to just do the work himself, think how, if God were not God, He would desire to just make the world go well. But God suffers (if God is capable of suffering) our faults. And God is love. Love, therefore (transitively whatever), must be patient.

The Day After Christmas

Spent the morning looking at different translations of Matthew 1:25, the sort of pedantic research I've basically shunned for the past year or so. The result of this is Jene = Brain going in circles.

My post-Christmas etymological romp was mostly centered around the Greek word heos, which my spellcheck endearingly thinks is "hoes". It means "until" or "till" and is used in Matt. 1:25: "[A]nd he did not know her until she brought forth her firstborn son." I eventually got stuck at Catholic.com, because it had both the Greek etymology (I had out my Gk. NT and my Strong's both and was feeling that I was the picture of the 'self-sufficiency without fashion' that I read of in Pride and Prejudice yesterday until I got sucked in by C.com's quotes from Irenaeus.)

Of course, that page ^ (above) contains the usual hairsplitting quibbling I'm used to on both sides of this debate about what it really means when a body says “until” -- you know, the kind that makes court prosecutors rip their hair out.

On the one hand, I can’t imagine anyone being shown this verse and thinking that Mary was a perpetual virgin; on the other, as Catholic.com likes to remind us, “There is also the burial of Moses. The book of Deuteronomy says that no one knew the location of his grave ‘until this present day’ (Deut. 34:6, Knox). But we know that no one has known since that day either.” ((Aside: In my mind, this is still a borderline silly argument because ‘until’ here seems to mean ‘up to’, which doesn’t really tell us anything deliciously Catholic when plugged into Matt 1:25.))

This stuff (belonging to either the Papists or the Protestants) usually makes me dissolve into confused despair and scream at my brother to turn the Xbox down and renders me sulky when trying to watch family videos of pin-the-nose-on-the-clown. (In otherwords, disrupts my personal life.)

It’s kind of the theological equivalent of having Bill Clinton on the witness stand: Have we told you about the 22 different meanings of “Jesus’ brothers” in Luke? Have we told you that the Greek word for “wine” also refers to “unfermented grape juice”?

((Really more of an aside: to my mind, NewAdventing and Catholiccomming is kind of like cheating by using prefab pie crust. [This could be because I am proud.] I mean, it’s having someone else do all the legwork of finding the Greek and the positive arguments of the saints and the objections and the responses, but, uh, whatever. Actually, when I grow up, I'm going to write a really clear book for Protestants called "This is Actually What the Church Fathers Said In Big Paragraphs I Swear I Wrote This While I Was Still Searching And Not Biased And Here It Is In Greek Too And This Book is Five Million Pages Fat Because It Has All the Alternate Translations", and it's going to be, like, all quotations and no agenda. Because hauling dusty volumes off of shelves makes me sneeze, and reading bits and pieces of actual quotations seamlessly welded into fat sentences in books published by Zondervan and Ignatius Press makes me suspicious of manipulation. End really brief aside.))

Mnnnnnnnaugh! (<-- Noise of theological quitting-time.) Time to watch family videos.

I was cute when I was five, and heartily pagan.

Reading!Time

Recent reading habits:, because I'm a shameless copycat:
Pride and Prejudice: Trying to get through this for a fourth time. Am now mature[r]. Succeeding admirably and with happiness!

Next up in line are Brideshead Revisited (again; I'm hoping it will make me feel all snuggly towards Catholicism in that disturbing and wholesome Waugh way) and The Age of Innocence. (I can't help but notice that John is reading Wharton, too.) As I just wrote on the last post's comments section (excuse the mindless repetition), my brother also bought me a B&N card with which I can buy The End of the Affair (extra seminar for school, this is not me copying John's reading habits) and a Catechism; if there's enough money left, I'm going to also buy Eusebius.

In addition, I'm in the middle of Thomas Howard's On Being Catholic, which is an incredibly good book with some incredibly pretentious sentences in it. Howard's writing style gives me a headache half the time (he likes to name-drop Latin phrases and allusions to expensive literature) but I think most of what he says is true. Next time the book itself is handy, I'll be sure to post a few of his more hilariously pompous sentences. :D Nevertheless, this book is my current "comfort food" (does that make his overly long sentences "fatty"?) as I'm a big fan of aesthetic conversion, and I've spent several nice hours under my new duvet reading it. <3.

ETA: I've also just noticed that being a contributor to this blog is like buying the extended "Into the Unordinary DVD", because if you go to "Edit Posts" on our posting section, you find several scraps of "draft posts" written by John. I can just see the cover now: "INTO THE UNORDINARY COLLECTOR'S EDITION: BONUS! NOW WITH 20% MORE UNFINISHED JOHNTHOUGHTS."

I'm Getting Myself in Over my Head

Here's a list of books I've started/been told to read/want to read before I go back to school:
Newman's "apologia"; "economics in one lesson" by henry hazlitt; "ethan frome" by edith wharton; "of music and music making" by bruno walter; "the end of the affair" by graham greene; "an introduction to the nichomachean ethics" by michael pakaluk; faulkner's "the sound and the fury"; and "war as I knew it" by general patton.

i think I'm going to narrow the list to "economics in one lesson" so I can return that before I leave (I own most of the others) and "the end of the affair", so that will be done in time for a seminar when I get back to school. the others will have to be added to the ever-growing list, which is counter-intuitive, considering I'm constantly finishing books. after those, hopefully i'd finish the apologia and the faulkner.

Some New Members of the Household

Lulu is an ugly enough dog. She's a combination of a poodle and a labrador, regrettably called a “labradoodle”. Luckily, she doesn’t shed way too much hair as a result of this biological magic-work. She also lives in the house, which gave me quite a start when, upon coming home from college in the middle of the night, I opened the front door and stood face to face with some unknown hairy beast. (Last year I came home to a new house, which was a little more shocking.)

Mud face or bacon or whatever his name is – it suffices to say he’s a pig – lives somewhere in the backyard, or sideyard, but I’ve never seen him. I'm not quite sure how he (she? it?) lives outside in near and sub zero temperatures. Apparently he lives on donuts and leftovers and will be eaten. The little boys (my brothers) are cool with this: somehow the idea of eating their favorite pet doesn’t traumatize them. (Yes, they seem to like the pig more than the dog.) Nicholas even calls the poor animal “bacon”. If only that sweet little pig knew…(I still haven't gone out to see it. Too cold!)

Small public service announcement

Thanks to pressure from the home front (& my moreorless spiritual director, who is grumpy with the fact that I can't talk on the phone very often), I'm going to return to writing in my own personal private Blogspot, with which I just spent like an hour fiddling. (Sentences always look funny when you fix them to not end with a preposition, don't they?)

Update your links accordingly, or, uh, continue ignoring as yoosual. As you were!

Kanye West on Christmas, Sort Of

Supporting my hypothesis...

"They say you can rap about anything except for Jesus
That means guns, sex, lies, video tapes
But if I talk about God my record won't get played Huh?
Well let this take away from my spins
Which will probably take away from my ends
Then I hope this take away from my sins
And bring the day that I'm dreaming about
Next time I'm in the club everybody screaming out

(Jesus Walks)
God show me the way because the devil trying to break me down
(Jesus Walks)
The only thing that that I pray is that my feet don't fail me now"

Worth a look after you've read my previous post:

A way better post by another, more intelligent bloggerfriend of mine, budding Catholic theologian Mike Novak. :D

Oh give me a hoooooome

Look, substance!

I come home and everybody is talking about this:

In which the chair of religious studies at Kansas University decides it will "be a nice slap in their big fat face" [referring to what he calls "fundies"] to teach a class on Christianity & intelligent design for mythology credits. (All Lewis-Tolkieny "myth became fact" lingo aside, naturally.)

Naturally, Kansas is really sensitive about these things; there are still daily letters into the editor at the Topeka Capital-Journal about the whole creation-evolution flap that has been in constant Kansasian disarray for four or five years now, ever since the school board decided to give the option (which, as far as I know, no one has taken) to teach intelligent design alongside evolution. It doesn't take much searching on the Internet to find lots of satire on Kansas' decision, the most famous of which is probably the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Fortunately for this particular scenario, in light of some e-mails of Dr. Mirecki's that went public in which he called JPII "J2P2" and "a corpse in a funny hat wearing a dress" and described his first Eucharist in less than friendly terms, the conservative contingent at KU (not very many of them, even after the famous Integrated Humanities Program, a limited Great-Books venture whose effects are still felt strongly at TAC) turned the favorite university "tolerance!" cry against the religious studies department, with success.

Fortunately, most university officials (except the chancellor, uh, be that as it may) who have heretofore taken a stance against Christianity (and even helped dismantle the IHP program) have been willing to concede that this is more-or-less hate-speech, and stopped the class from going forwards. Mirecki was "forced out" of his chair by his department - interesting to note that it wasn't by university officials - and very kindly turned around and sued KU for failing to stand up for him.

The best part is when he later claimed he was beaten up by two rednecks on a rural road near the university. The university won't refer to the incident as anything other than "the alleged beating of Professor Mirecki", and Mirecki himself has been mum on the matter. (When asked to clarify: "I can, I just don't want to.")

And of course the main fallout of this is that everyone in Kansas is running around like chickens with their heads cut off, particularly all the folks at KU, concerned that "it is only going to propagate the rumor that we in Kansas are all ignorant rednecks." Because, you know, allowing people to have the option to teach intelligent design makes you an "ignorant redneck".

Somebody better run and tell Anthony Flew really, really quickly that he's an "ignorant redneck".

Obviously, the biggest problem here is the instant equation "INTELLIGENT DESIGN = RELIGION", which just allows everybody to default into their hot-button positions on Christianity and the state, which is, in my opinion, nothing other than intellectual laziness. It is this which threatens to undermine both the ID movement and academic freedom: instant bigoted stereotyping on both fronts. The ID movement has had my respect all along as a clean-cut, deeper-than-surface treatment of the subject of creation and evolution, and the unleashing of hotly-charged visceral reactions against it has been, in my opinion, unspeakably base on both sides.

The Fundamentalist young-earth creationists hijack ID (which really doesn't suppose anything other than a "prime mover") and prevent it from being taken seriously with their obvious attempts to use it to Bible-bang; the universities point at them and jump up and down and go, "SEE! SEE!" and absolutely everyone is completely unreasonable. No one is talking sense any longer; most days, I just skip the Op-Ed page of my newspaper because absolutely no one can be civil and logical about this discussion under any circumstances.

(Interesting sidenote about Flew: Through a book by Gerald Schroeder, he's come to a Deistic view described as not unlike Thomas Jefferson's; Flew himself actually prefers to call it an "Aristotelian Deism".)

I always feel obliged to put my name in the post title less people think it's JHP.

This is my update.

In this my update, it is revealed that Jene actually missed the wedding she got up at three in the morning for (and drug Ryan out of bed for also), thanks to four inches of snow, two hours on a runway, and the fact that the airline lost her suitcase and therefore she did not own a skirt or a pair of pants, oh no, not even some khakis. She was stranded for three days in her tattered jeans and burnt umber TAC sweatshirt, and caught the flu besides. :) (I did wash the clothes every night.)

So the first few days of the vacation were spent flat on my back, trying to read Pride and Prejudice for the fourth time, in which I succeeded deliciously. I looked at a lot of Christmas lights and listened to a lot of Christmas music and wished I was well enough to go sledding ate a lot of chocolate, which of course helped me to get better quickly.

I still haven't seen too many of my friends yet, only my best friend Gwen and, uh, Nicole-from-school (also we ran into Matt-from-school [like my last-name censoring? I can't remember if we're supposed to be paranoid or not]at a bookstore, which was SHOCK!OMG, because apparently the TAC rule holds true even 1600 miles away: where two or more are gathered --), although tonight is Alumni Night at my high school, so I'll bump in to lots more.

I really love Alumni Night, because it's when everybody gets back together and whispers about how much weight so-and-so has gained and scrambles to bring in some sort of friend from college of the opposite sex at all costs, and there are lots of sports games and remembering things and food and general joviation all around. It really is good to see everyone again, small-school politics included. Some things never change (small-society squabbles are kind of homey to me), some teachers never forget you, some ex-friends never forgive you, and every year the varsity STILL gets its butt kicked by the alumni basketball teams. (Go figure.) I like seeing all the lives parading around in their various plumages. It's colorful.

It's funny to go back, in a lot of ways, because this is Topeka, Kansas and I'm the out-of-state kid who doesn't still see these people constantly. Juicy details about my life is hard to come by for them, and everyone else's lives have continued more or less en masse at K-State. The upshot of this is that tons of people that I never really knew well in H.S. will be super-glad to see me this evening, for which I adore them. The downshot of this is that I will be asked if I'm dating someone at least twenty times before the evening is out. (I'm going to tape a sign that says "NO!" on me right when I go in the door. :D)

By the way, this book is really, really good. (I read it straight through on the trip home.) She dies in the end, because all wives associated with people associated with CS Lewis do, but before that the Vanaukens have a marvellous, consciously-pagan love and make up all of these wonderful cultish Keatsian rules about it and go to Oxford and write a lot of really intelligent things about aesthetic conversion.

N.B. to John: My update is longer than yours, because I'm a girl!
N.B. to Ryan: Write something! And then don't delete it! Because it will give me joy.
N.B. to Zach: Uh, hi, Zach! I will not ask you to write anything as I recognize its futility.
N.B. to Nathanael, whose name I can't spell (I pickd the Irish way because it's cool) : If you posted, I would die of shock and it would be pleasant.

N.B to all: I've been playing the Decemberists CD Joe burnt for me in the mornings very loudly so as to educate my family (as John educates his; I am still on the 'being eddicated' phase of Sufjan and am conscious I don't know enough to teach yet) and my fruits so far are this: My brother (whom I forgot sleeps in until like dusk) coming into my room, sleepily pushing a shank of blonde hair out of his eyes, saying sleepily and angrily: "What kind of music is that?". (He listens almost exclusively to things like Postal Service and Chevelle.)

Irish Wisdom

"When we drink, we get drunk.
When we get drunk, we fall asleep.
When we fall asleep, we commit no sin.
When we commit no sin, we go to heaven.
So, let's all get drunk, and go to heaven!"

Make of that what you will.

Trouble in the Country

Having a two-year old pull you around by your hair at his whim = not good watch dog.

Futility, Such Futility (aka Conversation Between Friends)

So Ryan posted and then quickly erased his post. But I will continue his very short-lived suggestion.

Ryan, I miss you already. How's Wisconsin? In the short time I've been home, I played ringer in a Christmas concert at the Worcester Art Museum (one of three tenors), and made $75 (approximately). I plan on making another seventy-five tomorrow if I can help it, though I'm skipping out on a ski trip to NH to do so.

I started Newman's "Apologia Pro Vita Sua" and a diary/notebook of sorts (thanks to little Keren). Have succeeded in not watching way too much television (almost none, in fact) despite the conspicuously large TV less than 15 feet from my room. Have seen little of my friends, though poker night tomorrow is when we all get together for the first time.

And personal exhibitionism may or may not be as fun as you implied: we'll see after you respond.

P.S. New Rule! No deleting posts unless they are retarded (unlikely) or offensive (possible) or completely uninteresting (um, does this pass?).

Hmm

I made a playlist on my iTunes for "Playcount < 1" and turned up over 6 gigs. Is that good?

Another mortal sin for Jene

Anther way in which I have changed and become more Catholic appeared last night: with Topeka under five inches of snow and church thirty miles away, my mother announced last night that we wouldn’t be going to church on the fourth Sunday of Advent. She looked at me quizzically as I blabbed, “Why not?” and she said that snowy roads, etc., didn’t want to go to where my grandmother went obviously, and we didn’t see any other options.

When she asked, “What do you want to do?” in that tone that isn’t at all unkind and yet threatens to split the household anyway, I said, “Uh, no, that’s fine,” but what I really meant was, this city is full of churches, what do you mean, no other options? And then I realized that they’d really rather not go at all if it wasn’t in their four familiar walls, and that what they meant when they said there weren’t any other options, was that in their minds there wasn’t a single other ‘good’ church to be had.

Another difference between Protestantism and Catholicism! I was used to seeing the inconvenienced oversleepers and overnight adventurers scrambling for Sunday mass times, late, or Saturday, if necessary. In another city, a parish could be looked up and visited.

Funny how Protestantism is both so open and yet so exclusive! So open in stating that all denominations, the truth can be found in any and joined and left at will, so closed in that not worshipping at all is preferable to listening to a sermon from a strange pastor, and that not putting an hour aside for Christ is better than singing silly songs at the hands of lukewarm praise leaders – personal edification aside, as obviously one can learn nothing from the Scripture readings and is only praying to deaf ears when a liberal pastor asks for daily bread. (Of course the Catholics have a one up here, as a bad homily or dorky music doesn’t ruffle their feathers too much; it’s not the point anyway, and they seem to find God themselves without the perfect environment of conservatism dragging him in.)

For Protestants, there is no “other parish”, ever.

I could have suggested a church, I guess, but it would have only led to a family squabble over where to go, and unless I wanted to make like last Good Friday and pick a place I knew we could all dislike together (saving family unity!) – I don’t want to even touch this topic before Christmas.

Home Sweet

Finally, after a somewhat adventurous missed flight and attempted reissue, I'm back in America: Massachusetts, that is. And the indoctrination of my family has begun (nothing but sufjan on the radio).

A New Republican Party

A Speech by President Reagan

Reagan always seems to restore my hope in America. The Republican Party, on the other hand...

If You Like Sufjan as Much as I do...

you can go here to get live tracks from a Chicago show.

thanks to Overlyconcious

A Universal Axiom For Life

"Nothing is ever as bad as expected."

This has never failed, especially as regards finals. Once again, it proved true, when I walked into Ptolemy and there were 4 relatively easy questions and two easy props...and that was it.

Radiohead News

Soundtrack in the works?

Mr. Pietta

He's our modern Nero; a tyrant of liberal education, a corpulent man with white sneakers and white hair that looks just like a Roman statue. Without question he fiddled while our class - ptolemy - crashed and burned this semester. His favorite refrain was "look it's not that important" while the students saw on the blackboard darkly the divine truths of geocentric complexity (which is actually simplicity, if you're up on your Aristotelian physics). Just yesterday, the last class before the final, half of my peers were unaware that the movement of the fixed stars - 1 degree a century - did not and could not cause the yearly motion of the stars through the sky (the phenomenon of the Big Dipper, for example, setting at an earlier time each night). It's the motion of the sun on the ecliptic one said. What's the ecliptic, another. "look, it's not that important," mr. pietta. Sadly, it really is, and I have a final Tuesday.

This Would Be Pretty Cool

Beneath the Underdog

I Couldn't Resist

Larry Legend, Happy Birthday

Best Movie Review I've Seen in a While

I just took a surprisingly easy latin final, so I'm inspired to post.

WASHINGTON DIARIST
Hits
by Leon Wieseltier
Post date 12.09.05 | Issue date 12.19.05

A few days before I read in Time that Steven Spielberg's new movie is so significant that there had been no advance screenings of it, I went to an advance screening of it. The fakery is everywhere, isn't it, though in this instance it nicely captures the self-importance of this pseudo-controversial film. The makers of Munich seem to think that it is itself an intervention in the historical conflict that it portrays. For this reason, perhaps, they have devised a movie that wishes to be shocking and inoffensive at the same time. It tells the story of the Israeli retaliation for the massacre at the Munich Olympics in 1972--specifically, of the nasty adventures of a team of five Israelis that is dispatched to Europe to destroy eleven Palestinians. The film is powerful, in the hollow way that many of Spielberg's films are powerful. He is a master of vacant intensities, of slick searings. Whatever the theme, he must ravish the viewer. Munich is aesthetically no different from War of the Worlds, and never mind that one treats questions of ethical and historical consequence and the other is stupid. Spielberg knows how to overwhelm. But I am tired of being overwhelmed. Why should I admire somebody for his ability to manipulate me? In other realms of life, this talent is known as demagoguery. There are better reasons to turn to art, better reasons to go to the movies, than to be blown away....

from TNR

Ave Maria

46. And Mary said: My soul doth magnify the Lord.
47. And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.
48. Because he hath regarded the humility of his handmaid; for behold from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.
49. Because he that is mighty, hath done great things to me; and holy is his name.
50. And his mercy is from generation unto generations, to them that fear him.
51. He hath shewed might in his arm: he hath scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart.
52. He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble.
53. He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.
54. He hath received Israel his servant, being mindful of his mercy:
55. As he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to his seed for ever.

St. Bonaventure on Mary's purity

Joe and Nick (my little bros)

Nick: "Hey, hey! Hey! Dat bisop is getting... hey! Dat bisop..."
Joe (leans over and whispers): "Nick, he's notta bisop, he's a pwiest! Don't say dat!"

Joe is also proud member of the i-got-stitches-under-the-age-of-six club, rocking a sweet get-up on his chin.

I Got Tagged (again)

Deirdre here tagged me to write a confession post. To stay away from some of the more pressing things I've been worrying about, I sought out this post from the vaults of my past writings on that other server. (Written last year during the Republic readings)

I've of late been wondering about this annoying and pitiful aspect of my character. I have quite a difficult time putting any of the inspirations I get from meditation, prayer, reading into effect. For example, I'll be reading the Bible when I'll suddenly be struck by something that will make me realize how serious Paul is when he says, "be fruitful in and out of season," and how much work must be done. Somehow, though, it never comes to pass.

There are two theories that I know of. One is St. Thomas's idea of "sloth" as the theological vice. He calls it something like boredom with the world – a depressed outlook at religion, going through the motions without emotion.

But, this I don't think explains my soul. I stumbled onto the following possibility in the Republic yesterday. Plato talks about the three parts of the soul. There are the desirous (animal, physical), calculating (intellect), and spirited. The spirited has for some time troubled me as to what it is, exactly. The best I can surmise now is that the spirited corresponds to the will, or perhaps the ambitious strength of the will. This contradicts the saying, "The Will is strong but the Flesh is weak." I think that, perhaps that would be better expressed by, "The Intellect is strong but the Will is weak; it bends to the demands of the Flesh." (Addendum: Augustine talks about this same dilemma in the Confessions, discussing the apparent existence of two wills: The one which desires the true good is incomplete, overcome by the "law of the members" that pulls the will towards earthly things. This must be right.)

Now Plato believes - I think rightly - that gymnastics (physical exercise) is bent not so much towards the body (only indirectly) but towards the spirited part of the soul. One who exercises well and frequently will have a strong Will. But one can't be too spirited; one must not be a beast. So how does one balance the aggressive influence of exercise? Plato believes good music provides this balance. This is his theory, in a paraphrase: If one is raised with proper music as a youth, beauty and all things associated with beauty - justice, virtue, goodness - become easily recognizable. Beauty becomes like a favorite melody; you hear it everywhere you go. But the bad affect is that, insofar as it counteracts spiritedness, it causes one to sit back, to be a passive observer.

This is my soul. For the last three years now, I've been listening almost exclusively to classical music, undeniably more ordered and beautiful than anything else. I've noticed one thing in particular: my vicious temper, so long a bane of my existence, has almost disappeared, at least my violent temper. Furthermore, I have a tendency to observe without action. This also explains my lack of pious fervor. I sit back, reading the Bible - Augustine now, taking in all the beauty, without doing anything about it. Plato's theory corresponds to my life. Exercise without music leads to aggressiveness. Music without exercise leads one to sloth.

The TAC Music Scene

The Thomas Aquinas College Choir gave a rough reading of the Durufle requiem. They pulled it off about as well as a very amateur choir could pull it off: it's an exceptionally difficult piece. (I was reading through the score and there are passages in which the time changes bar by bar.) But they did the version (I think the 2nd) that has only organ accompaniment (with a cello for the "Pie Jesu"). Though Durufle was a master organist, I think the texture that is added by strings and the few trumpet parts is irreplaceable.

Opus Dei

My pops wrote this as a general introduction to Opus Dei a very long time ago. I just found it online.

Fr. Buckley

Fr. Buckley: Hey, Patrick, I haven't been seeing you around lately down at the shop. Where've you been?

Patrick: I got off of work-study, Father. I got a job online.

Fr. Buckley: Really, what are you doing?

Patrick: I'm a male model, father.

Fr. Buckley: Oh yeah, for what zoo?