Basia me, Catholica sum

The Last Post.

2007-07-05T18:10:00.000-07:00

Three and a half years is a pretty good run for a blog, I think. Looking through my archives, I'm struck by how much of my life is recorded there. And by how many fascinating and friendly people commented on my posts. I started Basia Me back in high school, and now I can see grad school on the horizon. It seems like a very short time when compressed into the archives of a blog. And yet I managed to do a lot of growing up in those months.

I know that some of you will be sad to see Basia Me end. I'm sad about it too, but I just can't keep up this particular blog anymore. For some time now I've been wanting to write a more focused blog, because all of my inspiration these days is coming from poetry and the discussion of poetry, and I always held myself back from narrowing Basia Me. But now I feel burnt out on this blog. I need a change, irrational as that may sound.

So, without further hemming and hawing, here's my new blog:

For Keats' Sake!

The name isn't just a cute pun. This blog is my crie de cour in defense of beauty and in defiance of 99% of the poetry that has been scribbled these last forty years. Some of you may remember the mouse poem in America and the contest it spawned. Well, this is the kind of stuff that keeps me up at night. I can either start writing about it, or suffer a breakdown of Eliotian proportions. Seriously, there's a reason why normal people find the mass of today's poetry to be about as enjoyable as a sharp stick in the eye, and it's not because all the good poets have been thrown in a gulag by Bush, or because modern poets are brilliant beyond mortal comprehension, or because there's something in the water nowadays that prevents us from writing anything musical, intuitive, or intricately made. Though I recently read an article in Poetry that came close to saying that:

Fifty years on, it may be impossible to write well in the exalted language that intoxicated Sylvia Plath (and me) in the days when poets aspired to rise through the magic of words to a level above ordinary life.

Without uncritically assuming that this is what the author really believes, I will respond by saying that if I believed that proposition were true, I would have to lie down and die. The rich music of verse, from inspired Isaiah to Auden at his most urbane and flippant, is what makes a poem a poem. Keats said that the poetry of earth was never dead, and meant that nature is always full of purpose and music; but I will be a plodder and have it mean that poetry has been with us from the beginning and will only leave us when we leave it.

The poetry of earth is ceasing never:
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The Cricket’s song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,
The Grasshopper’s among some grassy hills.

The world is wide and poetry surely thrives in many places outside of America, like the grasshoppers singing in one hemisphere when winter has silenced them in the other. But all my hopes and concerns lie in the Anglosphere, and I'm very interested in the fate of that hardy little cricket.

So here goes. Father Hopkins, pray for me!

Blogging from Rome

2007-02-14T16:20:00.000-08:00

It's been two weeks since I arrived in Rome, and it already seems like I've been here longer than that. Though I am still not used to walking across St. Peter's Square to get to class every day. I've been to Mass in St. Peter's, met Cardinal Arinze, celebrated the feast of St. Scholastica at Monte Cassino, and marked the feast of Cyril and Methodius by partying and processing at San Clemente. Tomorrow I'm leaving for Assisi, then for Florence and Siena. The internet is erratic here, and I have to get up early tomorrow, so I'll simply refer my readers to the new blog I've made for my semester in Italy. I've put up a few pictures there.

Belloc's Windmill

2007-01-24T18:01:00.000-08:00

Did you know that Hilaire Belloc's old mill at King's Land is being used as a set for a British detective show?

I didn't, until I found this site, which will tell you all about the windmill and (this is important) when you can visit it. During my semester in Rome I'll have some free weekends, and I intend to make a little trip to England sometime in April.

Shipley Windmill is simply crammed with memories of Belloc. One Christmas, the Belloc children were led out into the wintry dark and up through the trapdoor onto the second floor of the mill, where they found an improbable Christmas tree, covered with candles, and their presents beneath. At other times of the year they used the windmill in their innocent games, which typically involved jumping on the sweeps and riding the mill as if it were a ferris wheel. They were straight out of the Cautionary Tales, those Belloc kids.

A Local March For Life

2007-01-22T22:29:00.000-08:00

Washington was out of the question, so I went to a small march in my hometown. There was a Mass and then a "prayer walk." The Asian priest who said the Mass was named Fr. Noel and I have never heard anyone so passionate in the pulpit. At first he was calmly magisterial and somber. He spoke of the demons of the biblical world, how they were thought to kill children. Then he began to talk about the killing of children today, and his voice filled with anger. I listened in nervous awe as he came close to tears, flared into perfect righteous anger again, and turned his anger into the gentleness of a saint - the kind of gentleness that scares you; it's like a bottomless sea, perfectly still. And he did this multiple times. I kept waiting for him to scream "FIRE!" and summon a bucket brigade by accident, like Edmund Campion did. Fr. Noel, at least, was not inured to the evil we were protesting today.

Our march took us through downtown, where a counter-march was waiting for us. On seeing us they began to chant and walk down the other side of the street, while we kept silent. Our numbers were slightly larger than theirs, but they had more support from bystanders and drivers. Anyway, here are the pictures. Click on them to see the full size versions.

My best shot, I think

View of march

Me

Across the street

The church

Saint Nicholas, savior of children

Sanctuary

Peter and Paul

Two Short Stories for January 22

2007-01-22T20:48:00.000-08:00

Hills Like White Elephants
by Ernest Hemingway

I first read this in high school, and I was intrigued by the way it snuck around the ideology of my largely pro-choice classmates and haunted them. They read Hemingway's curt little description, The shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain, and saw fertility denied and love imperiled. The story is just a conversation, really - it uses the absolute minimum to achieve its effect. Amy Welborn has a thread about it here.

Why Can't He Be You?
by Eve Tushnet

This story has the same realism as Hemingway's. And by "realism" I mean its honesty about how quotidian and colorless evil can be when you actually see it, in real life, without a lot of adjectives decorating it. Graham Greene said something (I don't have the quote) to the effect that often it's easier to die than to make a scene, as anyone who has ever prayed at an abortion clinic can attest. (The poem below came from that feeling of helplessness.)

Eve's story, though, holds out the stark assurance that these suspended emotions will be purged in the end, "someday, but not today." Today, the narrator's very equanimity reveals a convalescent conscience and a soul still weak from a long illness, the longest illness; but someday she will know the raw happiness of grief. Beati qui lugent. Someday this sensual twilight will be lifted from us, and the music that rules us in the logical kingdom of our principles will sound in the substantial air, self-evident to the ear, so that we can march and dance to it at the same time. And death shall have no dominion.

But it will not be today. Not on this day out of all the year.

Clinic

2007-01-22T20:16:00.000-08:00

Hell has a paved front walk
And a manicured lawn,
A shade tree that must rustle its leaves
In the hours before dawn,
And a street address.

Hell blackens earth with blood,
But in the dark.
Passersby have no idea -
Not a cry, not a mark
Escapes the white rooms of that sanitary place.

Hell's wedged between a preschool and an embassy.
The babbling children playing tag next door
Attract no baleful notice, it would seem;
Unless harm rains silent, as from a reactor core.
You probably expected to see more.

Even the truth-fast criers-out who come
Day after day to pray and plead in very life's defense
Find their minds grown distant and diffuse
When the honeyed light of Sunday afternoons
Warms walls that ooze the blood of innocence.

by Meredith

Prayers

2007-01-19T16:51:00.000-08:00

My grandfather died on September 14, on the feast of the Triumph of the Cross. I know I have been gone for a long time, but I am asking you all for your prayers. My family did not expect this and we have all taken a hard blow.

Returned.

2007-01-18T22:47:00.000-08:00

To the handful of souls still reading this blog: your heroic patience has been rewarded. Sometimes Bonny Prince Charlie really does come back to Scotland; sometimes Numenor rises from the waves; sometimes Firefly goes back on the air for another season. (At least they do so in my peculiar version of reality.) From time to time during my delinquency (hiatus is too dignified a word for it) I would peek at Basia Me and think, "Argh! When is this blogger going to update her site?" After a split second I would realize that I was responsible for all that inactivity, and I would leave, crestfallen.

In two weeks I am going to move to a new blog which will be about my Italian adventures, and hopefully about my English adventures as well. That will last for three months, and afterwards I will decide what I want to do about Basia Me. When I started this blog back in high school, it ranged over plenty of topics but had very little focus or definition. After Rome, I will either redesign it or start a new blog.

I haue hadde it wyth thes cursed by Seynt George snakes on this cursed by Seynt George shippe!

2006-09-06T17:01:00.000-07:00

What is it with all these dead people reviewing movies? Now we have Chaucer reviewing... well... you know. Not only does he review it, he turns it into a Romaunce. And he draws a touching moral from Samuel Jackson's notorious line:

‘What haue ye seyde?’ askede the PRIORESSE then. ‘I did curse the snakes,’ seyde Sir Neville, ‘and therwith the shippe, in the name of Seynt George who ys a patron of valour and chivalrie.’ ‘Ywis,’ seyde the PRIORESSE, ‘yower cursinge hath borne good fruyt, for methinkede whan I herde ye speke thus that the arme of man, eek even of a mighti man swich as yowerself, is but a litel thinge compared to the grete power of God the which is dispensed thorow the mediacioun of the seyntez. And thes serpentes the which do make werre ayeinst us aren figuraciouns of the sinne of ower firste parentes who weren by a serpent deceyved, and thus thei signifien that we sholde seke nat strengthe in knighthede but in prayere and devocioun. For syn we face thes foule serpentes, mesemeth we must seeke succour and aide from the gret seynt who is the enemy ysworn of al maner of serpentes.’

‘Dang, babye,’ seyde Sir Neville, ‘ye speke gret wisdam.’

And alle the crewe prayed to Seynt Patrick and thorow hys mercy the serpentes were slayne every oon of hem and the shippe came safelye to shore.

Good Lord saue us alle yn swich a maner as thou hast saved Danyhel in the liones den and Jonah in the wales bellye and saue us especiallye from Snakes on the See, in the name of Jesu ower Lord and Seynte Patrick

HEERE ENDETH THE BOKE OF SIR NEVILLE DE FLYNN AND THE SERPENTES ON THE SHIPPE

(My thanks to Patrick.)

"Chaucer" has also produced a work titled The Cipher of Leonardo, in which Dan Brown's idiotic prose becomes rather more agreeable verse.

"Multi-storey car park versus Roman wall - who wins?"

2006-09-03T19:19:00.000-07:00

I noted the title of this article with interest. The blogger who relayed the story from a newspaper in Bingen answers the question thus: "As it's Germany, the Roman wall wins."

Important Boppard finds from Roman times feature in a new archaeological park in the town. Dominating the site and the top of Kirchgasse is a massive fortress curtain wall, some 60 metres long and eight metres high. The wall linked two towers of a huge Roman fort that once stood at the side of the Rhine.

Astonishing experts by its excellent preservation, the wall came to light when workmen began digging for a multi-storey car park - a project soon abandoned. Apart from similar remains in the UK, the finds were judged to include the best section of a Roman wall of this period uncovered anywhere north of the Alps.

Other items found included 12 graves made from stone tiles. Cloth fragments indicated that the graves were of Christians buried in the 7th or 8th centuries. Also uncovered was the cellar of a fortress-house, with wall apertures for archers, from the 12th and 13th centuries, and the remains of a horse-mill.

The wall was used at least through the 13th century. I wonder when it got covered up?

That casual opening remark about Germany, though; that suprised me--and then it made me think of something that Belloc said in The Path to Rome:

The German spirit is a marvel. There lay Porrentruy. An odd door with Gothic turrets marked the entry to the town. To the right of this gateway a tower, more enormous than anything I remembered to have seen, even in dreams, flanked the approach to the city. How vast it was, how protected, how high, how eaved, how enduring! I was told later that some part of that great bastion was Roman, and I can believe it. The Germans hate to destroy. It overwhelmed me as visions overwhelm, and I felt in its presence as boys feel when they first see the mountains. Had I not been a Christian, I would have worshipped and propitiated this obsession, this everlasting thing.

Altae Moenia Romae

2006-09-01T12:22:00.000-07:00

Outside, the rain falls. I sit here alone in the library. What should I do? For Sheila and Stephanie and lostnoldo are all in Rome, along with John and Charlemagne and half the junior class. The lucky ducks! I wonder where they must be right now. I know that lostnoldo is probably singing "The Rising of the Moon" on the Ponte Sant' Angelo right now, participating in the expat version of Christendom's infamous Friday-night riverside symposium, but the others? I most likely won't hear from them for days, or weeks. When you're in Rome, you have better things to do than sitting in an overpriced internet cafe.

Sarah and I will be going to Rome ourselves in a few months, but I can't help wishing that I were there right now. Instead, I sit in my room translating Virgil and Homer... studying the history of Byzantium... thinking about doing the reading for Moral Theology and Medieval Philosophy...

And really that's exciting enough for the present.

Christendom on the Big Screen

2006-08-25T16:50:00.000-07:00

Mike Powell and the Mason brothers have produced their second film and their first full-length feature: a drama titled Chorus which will premiere this Sunday. I'll be going to the premiere at the Royal Oak Theater in Front Royal, and I intend to review the movie on this blog. The official site for the film is here, and you can watch the trailer. I've seen their first film, Discretion, and it was a really excellent effort. Chorus will be their first film to have Explicit Catholic Themes (scandalous!), but although I was an extra in it, I still know very little about the plot. So I am intrigued.

A Meeting of Bloggers

2006-08-17T23:42:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday I went to Mass at the shrine of Saint Francis of Assisi in (where else?) San Francisco, and afterwards I went to Erik's lecture on Fra Angelico, which was excellent. Patrick of Orthonormal Basis and Deirdre of Give Tongue were also there, and I had a great time talking with them.

Something from Erik's lecture that quite shocked me was the revelation that this fresco is not actually by Fra Angelico. Good grief!

This painting is still definitely by Fra Angelico:

I just love that Turkish carpet that everyone is standing on.

Before I go, one more link: St. Anthony of Padua Institute. Erik is encouraging everyone to join, Bay Area Catholics in particular. The Institute's ultimate goal is to found a Catholic liberal arts college in the Bay Area.

People to pray for

2006-08-16T23:26:00.000-07:00

Please pray for my grandfather, who has cancer. We learned of his illness several weeks ago, but recently it has taken a turn for the worse. St. Peregrine, pray for us.

As many of you know, Regina Doman lost her 5-year old son Joshua in a car accident last month. Danielle Bean has stopped collecting donations to help Regina's family buy a new car, but you can still send checks to Regina's brother-in-law:

Mike Schmiedicke
PO BOX 1963
Front Royal VA 22630

On the website that Regina made for Joshua there is now a dream that Regina's daughter, Marygrace, had about Joshua. The whole site is beautiful and I hope you all have the time to read through it. Regina is very strong in the Faith. And even as you pray for the Schmiedicke family, remember that Joshua is now a saint in heaven. We can pray to him now. An astonishing thought.

I read on Kateri's blog that a Christendom alumnus, Will Davulis, was killed in a motorcycle accident as he was riding to visit his brother in the hospital. Please pray for him, his brother and their family. And please pray also for Anthony Smitha (Christendom '05) who lost his father on June 20th.

The Art of Triolets

2006-08-07T17:27:00.000-07:00

Your triolet should glimmer
Like a butterfly;
In golden light, or dimmer,
Your triolet should glimmer,
Tremble, turn, and shimmer,
Flash, and flutter by;
Your triolet should glimmer
Like a butterfly.

-Don Marquis

Sheila has announced the results of her triolet contest. The submissions were fantastic, exhibiting wit, color, and metrical grace (which is VERY important. See above poem.) As I read and wrote more triolets, I began to notice more and more complexities in the form, and I started to write a little triolet primer in my head. These are some of my observations.

As forms go, triolets are peachy: easy to write, but capable of depth; more dignified than limericks, but lighter than sonnets. They are ideal for conveying sweet nothings (or somethings...) to one's beloved, but as Sheila's contest has proved, the triolet is afraid of nothing! Though it may be impossible to write a triolet without any humor in it. Once I did write a ghastly triolet which teetered on the edge of nihilism, but I will spare you the sight. Besides, it wasn't a real triolet. Anyhow, when you start a triolet, you are already half done. If I write

The Berkley sunshine rarely smiles,
But my, it's shining bright today!

then I already have the outline of the poem:

The Berkley sunshine rarely smiles,
But my, it's shining bright today!
*
The Berkeley sunshine rarely smiles
*
*
The Berkley sunshine rarely smiles,
But my, it's shining bright today!

I am left with only three spaces. This requires me to be something of a contortionist. The rhyme scheme tightens things further: The first couplet I make up ends ab--and a and b are all I get for the whole poem; 5 a-rhymes and 3 b-rhymes. The first two lines determine your rhyme scheme, and they form your poem's ending. (This is what T.S. Eliot was talking about when he said, "In my beginning is my end." You know how much he loved to write triolets...) Thus, the first two lines of your triolet are the most important, structurally speaking.

But the real fun is in the remaining three lines. This is where you can introduce your Ogden Nash-style rhymes, your pungency or poignancy, and all the various twists and turns of alliteration and internal rhyme and such. The last line before the repetition of the opening can become the triolet's punchline, or it can do something subtler... it is a useful point to center the triolet around. Look at this one of Chesterton's:

If I were a fish I should
Miss occasional luxury
Such as climbing in the wood
(If I were a fish I should)
Church-going is also good
Mostly I should miss the sea
If I were a fish I should
Miss occasional luxury.

"Mostly I should miss the sea." This line is unexpected and funny, yet somehow also sonorous and wistful. It makes the poem. But notice that Chesterton commits an infelicity that is common in triolets: His opening couplet is constructed so that the first line can't do anything logical when it is repeated in the fourth line, and Chesterton can only put it in parentheses as a sort of echo. To avoid this, you can either make the first line a complete statement, or make it a dependent clause capable of connecting with the lines before or after it. Actually, you should always connect it if you can. Here is a good example:

In the school of coquettes
Madam Rose is a scholar.
They fish with all nets
In the school of coquettes:
When her brooch she forgets
Tis to show a new collar.
In the school of coquettes
Madam Rose is a scholar.

Ah, the Rose triolets! They were the first triolets I ever read. Here are two more:

Rose kissed me to-day.
Will she kiss me tomorrow?
Let it be as it may,
Rose kissed me today.
But the pleasure gives way
To a savour of sorrow;-
Rose kissed me to-day,-
Will she kiss me tomorrow?

I intended an Ode,
And it turned to a Sonnet.
It began à la mode,
I intended an Ode;
But Rose cross'd the road
In her latest new bonnet;
I intended an Ode;
And it turned to a Sonnet.

While I was searching for these triolets, I stumbled onto a little exchange on a U. of Chicago mailing list. It involved communism, molecular theory and triolets, and contained this gem:

I love triolets because they are both pleasant and safe to use. Authors of triolets are responsible for fewer than 15% of this year's violent deaths, and have started fewer wars than authors of odes, rondeaus, sonnets and blank verse combined. Other forms (or lacks thereof) are quite different: to paraphrase Thomas Pynchon, the only thing you feel like doing after hearing something of Wallace Stevens' is going out and invading Poland.

In fact, recent archival research has revealed that no less a figure than the anti-scholastic Sir Francis Bacon himself is believed to have authored over a dozen heretofore anonymous triolets. And Francois Hotman attributes Henry of Navarre's early victories over Guises' armies to a flaming triolet that appeared in the sky above the battlements of La Rochelle. "In haec forma, vinces!" Henry is reputed to have said, in French. So before you go about criticizing the triolet, Matt, you ought to do your homework.

So much for the triolet. But before I go, I want to say that Kevin's "The Latin on the keyboard coded" reminded me of Tantum ergo Sacramentum (terrible I know), and that Charlemagne's "The Buzzard" is practically perfect in every way (and reminiscent of The Bad Child's Book of Beasts), and that I'm still in love with "At ChesterCon I met some friends."

And finally: Sheila, I found a triolet by Sara Teasdale that I think you'll like:

Written in a copy of "The Poems of Sappho":

Beyond the dim Hesperides,
The girl who sang them long ago
Could never dream that over seas,
Beyond the dim Hesperides,
The wind would blow such songs as these --
I wonder now if she can know,
Beyond the dim Hesperides,
The girl who sang them long ago?

Coming Up for Air

2006-06-12T20:52:00.000-07:00

Alright. In two weeks at Berkeley I've learned how to decline nouns, conjugate verbs (in active, passive, AND the elusive middle), put together all manner of Conditional Sentences, Purpose Clauses, and Optatives of Wish ("If only I had less Greek homework!"), and what to do with an Enclitic, or more properly, the word preceding it. Having made it through all of this, I figured I was pretty much set. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, articles, relative/demonstrative pronouns, check. How bad could participles be?

As it turns out, the Greek Participle is like the Big Bad Final Boss of an unusually sadistic videogame - a sneering space robot, decked out with missiles and whirling knives and other assorted nastiness, which taunts you in an alien language before blowing you up.

(Maybe that was slightly hyperbolic. But I've been partial, lately, to personifying grammatical terms - after seeing this.)

I think I'm forgetting how to print the Roman alphabet. Except when writing the language of old Rome. For in spite of the exigencies of intensive Greek, I've managed to write a dram of Latin poetry in the margin of my textbook:

Hodie apparuit
Regina mane Flora;
nunc vidimus maritum,
thalassina hora.

or,

Today at early morn appeared
the Queen of things that flower;
now we see her bridegroom come
at the sea-green hour.

This makes almost no sense. But it's the first bit of Latin verse I've ever written, so I'm proud of it. Still, can someone more experienced in Latin tell me whether "thalassina" is over the top? It looked like such a lovely word when I stumbled across it in a dictionary, and I'd like to keep it for further use.

Poetry. I'm doing this so I can read poetry: Sophocles, Sappho, and Homer. I've decided that this blog needs at least two things (ask me and I'll tell you the rest): more posts, and more posts on poetry. At this moment I will further the cause of poetry by directing you to Sheila's Triolet Contest and John's sonnet sequence, which he wrote in honor of a friend's entrance into a Carmelite convent. When I can, I will review it and try to do it justice, but in the meantime let me say that I am very excited about such lines as "That very tree from which I oft secede," "A Godly embassy with golden frame," and "I do not say the sun must rise again,/Because I stand beneath its setting face."

And now... back to the Participle.

Rancho San Antonio

2006-05-22T20:23:00.000-07:00

Today my mom and I took a walk in the hills. It was warm and bright, and interesting fish scale clouds kept drifting across the sun, and the smell of the bay and eucalyptus and such really took me back to when I was a kid.

Me by an enormous bay tree.

The ruin of a Lourdes grotto that belonged to the old Maryknoll seminary on the edge of Rancho San Antonio. (That facility still stands, but it is now a retirement home. It's built in a combination of Spanish and Chinese architecture, having a green-tiled pagoda-like roof on its bell tower. Once it sent missionaries to China, but now... no more.) This desolate shrine is hidden from the trail and you have to walk on a fallen tree over a creek to get to it. But there is a well-trodden path to it, and sometimes you find candles there.

The herb garden at the little farm in the open space perserve.

Here's looking at you, kid!

A lady came into the barn and fed the goats. Her son was asking questions in a piping little voice, and he ended up helping her push a recalcitrant goat back into the pen. Very cute.

Besides goats, we also saw sheep, wild turkeys, California quail, and a barn cat with black fur and orange eyes. I know it sounds idiotic, but someday I'd like to see one of those fabled mountain lions. I'd also like to live to tell about it with lots of dramatic flourishes. So it's a binary wish.

Going to an East Coast College has made me realize just how improbably wonderful California is. There's no place like home. There's no place like home.

A Conspiracy

2006-05-20T03:18:00.000-07:00

One of Mark Shea's commenters (A. Nonymouse) submitted this priceless theory after reading about Mark's anti-DVC adventures in Northern Ireland:

Omigod, omigod, omigod!!!!!!!!!!!!

Take "Dan Brown." Mix up the letters to get "Ban Drown." Do the same to "Mark Shea": "Shark Mea," which is really "shark may."

The Ban is a river in Ireland. So is the Shannon.

The real Dan Brown was eaten by a shark in the Liffy!!!!!!!!

Mark Shea is the DIRECT DESCENDANT OF BRIAN BORU!!!!!!!!!!!!

Where's Mark's sceptre? Does the Merovingian know about this? Ah well, no matter! "And the Angelus bell o'er the Liffy swell / Rang out in the foggy dew." Ladies and gentlemen, goodnight.

Nunc est bibendum!

2006-05-20T03:16:00.000-07:00

The Year in Pictures (sort of)

Stephanie and I work on our Medieval Fest projects.

Sarah B. took this picture outside the chapel on a night in February when the whole campus looked like Narnia.

Sarah F. and me, on the same night, acting out a random scene from LotR. I'm Faramir, Sarah is Denethor. What can I say, we were feeling giddy.

The cool people went to Rome...

...and made a sidetrip to Pigeonopolis.

Penguins like Spring Formal too.

Dramatic Productions

There was a performance of T.S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party.

It was excellent, in an eccentric, Eliotian way. Can you have a chorus in cocktail dresses? Can you make a libation with gin and vermouth? In the world of TSE I suppose one can...

There was also the Scarlet Pimpernel musical.

Percy, help!

Finally there was the Spring Play - A Midsummer Night's Dream. Sepha was born to play Puck!

The play was staged with a charming 20's theme... there were swing-dancing fairies, which was especially absurd and sweet.

Oberon and Titania.

* * *

It was quite a year, but now it's over. Here's to the new juniors, here's to '07, here's to Rome!

Nunc est scribendum...

2006-05-07T18:09:00.000-07:00

Studying for finals continues furiously here at Christendom. Metaphysics final tommorrow... please pray for us!

Essentia tamen materiae non diversificatur sub diversis formis sicut ratio sua: ratio enim materiae non est una et communis sicut sua essentia est: ratio enim formae in diversis materiis est una, licet secundum esse sit diversa...

Aaahhhhhh!!!!!!!!

I wanna go home...

I have returned!

2006-04-18T11:17:00.000-07:00

Happy Easter to you all. Did everyone have a most lenten Lent? I know I did. I'm still wobbly from it, actually, which means that it was good. So many things happened during the time Basia Me was closed: I turned 20 (on March 28), I decided to major in Classics instead of English, and I figured out how get caught up on the Greek requirement for said major. I also got ahold of a signed copy of Hilaire Belloc's Belinda and participated in a Tridentine Triduum for the first time ever. In fact, I (and my intrepid friend Sarah) were conscripted into the choir! It was amazing...

About the Greek thing. I've been taking Latin for the past two years, but I always thought I would be an English major, so I never bothered to start Greek. But a few weeks ago I realized that I wanted to be a Classics major. So I'm going to do this.

Live at Berzerkly for ten weeks learning Attic Greek?! We'll see if I survive. If I do, I'll have a head full of Greek and tons of weird stories to tell.

Christus resurrexit!

2006-04-18T11:11:00.000-07:00

Exultet iam angelica turba caelorum:
exultent divina mysteria:
et pro tanti Regis victoria tuba insonet salutaris.

Gaudeat et tellus tantis irradiata fulgoribus:
et, aeterni Regis splendore illustrata,
totius orbis se sentiat amisisse caliginem.

Laetetur et mater Ecclesia,
tanti luminis adornata fulgoribus:
et magnis populorum vocibus haec aula resultet.

Quapropter astantes vos, fratres carissimi,
ad tam miram huius sancti luminis claritatem,
una mecum, quaeso,
Dei omnipotentis misericordiam invocate.
Ut, qui me non meis meritis
intra Levitarum numerum dignatus est aggregare,
luminis sui claritatem infundens,
cerei huius laudem implere perficiat.

Vers. Dominus vobiscum.
Resp. Et cum spiritu tuo.
Vers. Sursum corda.
Resp. Habemus ad Dominum.
Vers. Gratias agamus Domino Deo nostro.
Resp. Dignum et iustum est.

Vere dignum et iustum est,
invisibilem Deum Patrem omnipotentem
Filiumque eius unigenitum,
Dominum nostrum Iesum Christum,
toto cordis ac mentis affectu et vocis ministerio personare.

Qui pro nobis aeterno Patri Adae debitum solvit,
et veteris piaculi cautionem pio cruore detersit.

Haec sunt enim festa paschalia,
in quibus verus ille Agnus occiditur,
cuius sanguine postes fidelium consecrantur.

Haec nox est,
in qua primum patres nostros, filios Israel
eductos de Aegypto,
Mare Rubrum sicco vestigio transire fecisti.

Haec igitur nox est,
quae peccatorum tenebras columnae illuminatione purgavit.

Haec nox est,
quae hodie per universum mundum in Christo credentes,
a vitiis saeculi et caligine peccatorum segregatos,
reddit gratiae, sociat sanctitati.

Haec nox est,
in qua, destructis vinculis mortis,
Christus ab inferis victor ascendit.

Nihil enim nobis nasci profuit,
nisi redimi profuisset.
O mira circa nos tuae pietatis dignatio!
O inaestimabilis dilectio caritatis:
ut servum redimeres, Filium tradidisti!

O certe necessarium Adae peccatum,
quod Christi morte deletum est!
O felix culpa,
quae talem ac tantum meruit habere Redemptorem!

O vere beata nox,
quae sola meruit scire tempus et horam,
in qua Christus ab inferis resurrexit!

Haec nox est, de qua scriptum est:
Et nox sicut dies illuminabitur:
et nox illuminatio mea in deliciis meis.

Huius igitur sanctificatio noctis fugat scelera, culpas lavat:
et reddit innocentiam lapsis
et maestis laetitiam.
Fugat odia, concordiam parat
et curvat imperia.

O vere beata nox,
in qua terrenis caelestia, humanis divina iunguntur!¹

In huius igitur noctis gratia, suscipe, sancte Pater,
laudis huius sacrificium vespertinum,
quod tibi in hac cerei oblatione sollemni,
per ministrorum manus
de operibus apum, sacrosancta reddit Ecclesia.

Sed iam columnae huius praeconia novimus,
quam in honorem Dei rutilans ignis accendit.
Qui, licet sit divisus in partes,
mutuati tamen luminis detrimenta non novit.

Alitur enim liquantibus ceris,
quas in substantiam pretiosae huius lampadis
apis mater eduxit.²

Oramus ergo te, Domine,
ut cereus iste in honorem tui nominis consecratus,
ad noctis huius caliginem destruendam,
indeficiens perseveret.
Et in odorem suavitatis acceptus,
supernis luminaribus misceatur.

Flammas eius lucifer matutinus inveniat:
Ille, inquam, lucifer, qui nescit occasum:
Christus Filius tuus,
qui, regressus ab inferis, humano generi serenus illuxit,
et vivit et regnat in saecula saeculorum.

Resp. Amen.

Closed for Lent

2006-03-02T20:35:00.000-08:00

This poor blog has been shivering out in the cold for the past three weeks or so, and I think it needs to officialy close during Lent. Please say a little prayer for the Christendom sophmores, who are taking a drubbing from the curriculum again... I've been so busy with my studies that I haven't had time to go on the internet. Now that it's Lent, I have even less time for Basia Me.

May you all have a blessed Lent and come to Easter with fresh strength!

The Prayer of a Martyr

2006-02-11T13:19:00.000-08:00

This is a prayer written by Fr. Andrea Santoro, the priest who was killed in Turkey ten days ago. It is one of the most striking Marian prayers I have ever seen. (There is a little information on the prayer here, as well as many links to other stories about Fr. Andrea.)

Meryem anà

Mary, Woman of Jerusalem

Where you offered yourself with Jesus at the foot of the Cross

Mary, Woman of the Last Supper

Where you gathered the breath of the Holy Spirit,

Mary, Woman of Ephesus,

Where you came with John, ‘Your Son’

Sent in mission by the Spirit: Pray for us.

Mary, Mother of the sheep outside the fold,

Mother of those who do not know your son,

Mother of those who know not what they do: Pray for us.

Mary, Mother of lifeless souls,

Mother of lightless minds,

Mother of hopeless hearts,

Mother of sons, who killed your son,

Mother of sinners, Mother of the thief who did not repent,

Mother of the son who did not come back: Pray for us.

Mary, Mother of those who did not follow Him,

Mother of those who repudiated Him,

Mother of those who went back,

Mother of those who were not called: Pray for us.

Mary, Mother of those who like John

Seek the lost children of God,

Mother of those who descend in hell

To announce life to the dead: Pray for us.

Mary, Mother, come and live with me:

Come to the house where I am asked to live,

Come to the land where I am asked to go,

Come among the men I am asked to love,

Come to the divisions that I am asked to heal,

Come into the hearts that I am asked to visit.

Come to my home and be my mother,

Come Mary; give me your heart as mother.

“Meryem anà” “Mary, Mother” of all peoples: Pray for us.

What can I say about these words? They cannot be spoken about... only spoken.

Sacred Art at Christendom College

2006-02-10T11:27:00.000-08:00

Art must make perceptible, and as far as possible attractive, the world of the spirit, of the invisible, of God. It must therefore translate into meaningful terms that which is in itself ineffable. Art has a unique capacity to take one or other facet of the message and translate it into colours, shapes and sounds which nourish the intuition of those who look or listen. It does so without emptying the message itself of its transcendent value and its aura of mystery. - John Paul II, Letter to Artists

Christendom College is hosting Contemplating the Sacred: Religious Works of Contemporary Artists through March 17 (St Patrick's day!). It opened on February 5 with a talk by Catholic sculptor H. Reed Armstrong. You can read more about the exhibit here.

H. Reed Armstrong leads a tour of the exhibit

Detail, Descent from the Cross by Roxolana Luczakowsky
(She lives right here in Front Royal!)

My favorite artist in the exhibit is Edmund Sullivan, who is from Gloucester, Massachusetts. I love this Anunnciation:

...and his Madonna and Child with Rose:

(full size and detail)

My camera simply refused to capture the colors in these two paintings. I keep coming back to the library to look at them, and they put one instantly into a sort of prayerful quiet. If you live somewhere in the vicinity of Front Royal or DC, you might consider coming out to see this exhibit. There will be special events on the next four Sundays:

Feb. 12 - H. Reed Armstrong, Talk on Faith, Imagination, and Reason in Art, 7 PM, St. John the Evangelist Library, Ground Level.

Feb. 19 - Madison Brass, Concert of the Antiphonal Music of Gabrieli, 4 PM, library main level.

Feb. 26 - Dramatic Readings from T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, 7 PM, library ground level.

Mar. 12 - Round Table Discussion on Art, 7 PM, library ground level.

Mmmmm... I can't wait to hear that Gabrieli!

LotR: The Musical

2006-02-03T11:17:00.000-08:00

A stage setting of The Lord of the Rings will be premiering this March in Toronto. More stories can be found in the news archive of The Council of Elrond.

''[The story is] crying out for illusions, great dramatic, emotional scenes between strong characters. Spectacle. Transformations. Music. Action sequences… Aerial work, circus things, stilt walking. And I love all those things, and the idea that they could all coexist in one show is a very, very rare opportunity, and it's unusual for a piece of spectacle to have such a strong story, and vice versa. It's kind of the culmination of everything I'm interested in about theater, and it should be, if it works, a celebration of everything theater can do.''
- Matthew Warchus, director

The show is aspiring to be something like the Broadway Lion King, only bigger, if you can imagine. (I got to see that production last summer and it amazed me with its ingenuity and beauty, even though I had expected to hate it.) When I first heard about this thing, I rolled my eyes as disturbing visions of Legolas belting out the most irritating songs from Wicked pranced through my head - but now I'm thinking furtively of hitchhiking to Toronto. It sounds like it might turn out to be really cool - "circus things" and "stilt walking" aside. In any case, you can't deny that Tolkien was just asking for it when he said this:

"But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story....I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama." (Letters)

Tolkien called his dream "absurd," but it is becoming more and more real as time passes.

Happy Candlemas!

2006-02-02T16:16:00.000-08:00

Another of Eliot's devotional poems...

A Song for Simeon
T.S. Eliot

Lord, the Roman hyacinths are blooming in bowls and
The winter sun creeps by the snow hills;
The stubborn season has made stand.
My life is light, waiting for the death wind,
Like a feather on the back of my hand.
Dust in sunlight and memory in corners
Wait for the wind that chills towards the dead land.

Grant us thy peace.
I have walked many years in this city,
Kept faith and fast, provided for the poor,
Have given and taken honour and ease.
There never went any rejected from my door.
Who shall remember my house, where shall live my children's children
When the time of sorrow is come?
They will take to the goat's path, and the fox's home,
Fleeing from the foreign faces and the foreign swords.
Before the time of cords and scourges and lamentation

Grant us thy peace.
Before the stations of the mountain of desolation,
Before the certain hour of maternal sorrow,
Now at this birth season of decease,
Let the Infant, the still unspeaking and unspoken Word,
Grant Israel's consolation
To one who has eighty years and no tomorrow.

According to thy word.
They shall praise Thee and suffer in every generation
With glory and derision,
Light upon light, mounting the saints' stair.
Not for me the martyrdom, the ecstasy of thought and prayer,
Not for me the ultimate vision.
Grant me thy peace.
(And a sword shall pierce thy heart,
Thine also).
I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me,
I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me.
Let thy servant depart,
Having seen thy salvation.

Viking Mecha Flash Madness!

2006-01-24T17:29:00.000-08:00

My little brother finds the weirdest flash videos. This one (click on the far-right thumbnail) shows a bunch of Vikings attacking each other with electric guitar music. Normally I'm not into Vikings OR electric guitars, but this video was so artistic that I made my brother play it, like, three times, which he did with remarkable patience.

Diving in the Wreck of the Deutschland

2006-01-14T00:06:00.000-08:00

Fr. Jim of Dappled Things pulls together a whole series of posts on GMH's longest and most darkly dazzling poem. Perry Lorenzo's explication is rich and elaborate, like the poem itself:

Perhaps we might unlock the puzzle of this dense stanza (and the whole poem) if we remember that it is telling a tale on three levels---

-the literal tale of the actual wreck of the ship The Deutschland, and the drowning of the Nuns, and the heroic call of the Tall Nun

-the allegorical tale of modern Europe, of the West in wreck, of Germany in particular as the country of rebellion against God, of the attempt to destroy the Church, of the witness of modern Christians

-the moral tale of the interior life of Hopkins the poet himself, both as an artist and as a Christian, which seems to be most of all the poem’s concern, given the lengthy Part One which is a Principle and Foundation of the Spiritual Exercises of the whole

The Wreck of the Deutschland has always been seen as a forbidding and difficult poem - in fact, it could almost be the prototype of the Difficult Poem which ruled the 20th century. But like the Apocalypse, it sweeps you away with its strangeness and beauty whether you understand it or not. It was stanzas like this that made me love Hopkins:

Dame, at our door
Drowned, and among our shoals,
Remember us in the roads, the heaven-haven of the Reward:
Our King back, oh, upon English souls!
Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east,
More brightening her, rare-dear Britain, as his reign rolls,
Pride, rose, prince, hero of us, high-priest,
Our hearts’ charity’s hearth’s fire, our thoughts’ chivalry’s throng’s Lord.

Etymology Quiz

2006-01-09T19:31:00.000-08:00

Via Dappled Things.

This is such a fun game. Try it more than once; it changes.

It can be pretty tricky. You can't just guess the root word:

How about the etymological basis of money?

-The Romans erected a temple to Juno and gave the temple the name Moneta, the advisor. That was later the source of the first coin mint, in 269 BCE.

-From the Latin 'monetarius', pertaining to the mint

-From the French 'monei', currency

-From the Greek word meaning 'metal discs'

-After the Greek philosopher Monetius, whose discourse focused on how people could trade services fairly

For Epiphany...

2006-01-06T23:24:00.000-08:00

The Journey of the Magi
T.S. Eliot

'A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For the journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins,
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death,
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

A Christmas Move and A Visit from Google

2006-01-04T03:04:00.000-08:00

Yeesh, just look at the dust on this blog. We finally got our internet running again today. My family had to move to Mountain View over Christmas so that my brother and sister could keep going to the same high school, so we're renting a different house now.

A few days ago we had a surprise: a van showed up in front of our new house, and these guys were using a cherrypicker to fix some sort of box to the top of the streetlamp. My brother went outside and asked them what they were doing, and they said they were installing Google's new WiFi system. Google is going to supply free wireless internet to everybody in Mountain View! Pretty awesome. Right now I can see the streetlamp glowing through my window...

My brother has just informed me that the ancient Romans knew about something called "sleep," which they believed to have restorative powers. Yawn... I'll take the hint... Dormiam.

2005-12-24T20:40:00.000-08:00

2005-12-24T20:30:00.000-08:00

A Christmas Carol

The Christ-child lay on Mary's lap,
His hair was like a light.
(O weary, weary were the world,
But here is all aright.)

The Christ-child lay on Mary's breast,
His hair was like a star.
(O stern and cunning are the kings,
But here the true hearts are.)

The Christ-child lay on Mary's heart,
His hair was like a fire.
(O weary, weary is the world,
But here the world's desire.)

The Christ-child stood at Mary's knee,
His hair was like a crown.
And all the flowers looked up at Him,
And all the stars looked down.

- GKC

Back in California

2005-12-22T18:21:00.000-08:00

Rain, rain, rain. Oh well. At least there is no ice, like there was back in Virginia. Scary stuff. I've been hanging around the house, not doing much - my intermittent desire to sit down and write something seems vaulting ambition, like my resolution to learn Greek someday.

No homework over break. No finals when I get back. O glory!

Let's see... I'm sure there are some things I could mention to make this post worthwhile... Ah yes. My brother wishes you all to know that he has fixed the syndication-feed-thingie (orange button to the right), so that should be spiffier now. I also put up half of the Christendom quotes I've been saving (I wasn't aware that so many Rome students had been trying to keep up with them!)... and lastly, this is really cool. It's almost like being in the library... sans the books and carrels and high-speed internet.

Finals Folly

2005-12-14T08:53:00.000-08:00

Well, we're in the thick of finals here at Christendom College, so there's no way in hades I'm blogging anything substantial before Saturday, when I'll be back in the Bay Area at last (yay!) But I just had to link to a couple of hilarious posts from Fiddleback Fever...

Charlemagne (not-his-real-name) sends us an ad for an... ancient Greek marriage counseling service. Er... just trust me. Only a Christendom student would think up something this loopy.

*picture of Sean Bean here*

And my friend Sheila writes about how Christen-domers (heh...) study for philosophy phinals:

'Twas the night before finals, and all through the dorm,
Not a creature was sleeping, not even a Form.

Enjoy!

The Missioner

2005-12-09T11:28:00.001-08:00

This story is from a collection of Belloc's essays, "On Everything." I don't believe you will find it anywhere else on the internet. I came across it one day by chance in Christendom's library, and I thought you all would enjoy it at this time of the year: it is steeped in the strange feeling of Advent, all violet shadow and cedar and candlelight and the sound of Veni, veni Immanuel.

The Missioner
by Hilaire Belloc

In one of those great halls which the winter darkens and which are proper to the North, there sat a group of men, kindly and full of the winter night and of their food and drink, upon which for many hours they had regaled together, and not only full of song, but satiated with it, so long and so loudly had they sung. They all claimed descent form the Gods, but in varying degrees, and their Chief was descended from the father of the Gods, by no doubtful lineage, for it was his grandfer's mother to whom a witch in the woods had told the story of her birth.
In the midst of them as they so sat, a large fire smouldered, but having been long lit, sent up so strong a shaft of rising air as drew all smoke with it, towering to a sort of open cage upon the high roof tree of that hall whence it could escape to heaven.
I say they were tired of song and filled with many good things, but chiefly with companionship. They had landed but recently from the sea; the noise of the sea was in their ears as they so sat round the fire, still talking low, and a Priest who was among them refused to interpret the sound; but he said in a manner that some mocked doubtfully, others heard with awe, that the sea never sounded save upon nights when the Gods were abroad. He was the Priest of a lesser God, but he was known throughout the fleet of those pirate fishermen for his great skill in the interpretation of dreams, and he could tell by the surface of the water in the nightless midsummer where the shoals were to be found.
He said that on that night the Gods were abroad, and, indeed, the quality of the wind as it came down the gulf of the fjord provoked such a fancy, for it rose and fell as though by a volition, and sometimes one would have said that it was a quiet night, and, again, a moment after, one heard a noise like a voice round the corners of the great beams, and the wind pitied or appealed or called. Then a man who was a serf, but very skilled in woodwork, lying among the serfs in the outer ring beyond the fire in the straw, called up and said: "Lords, he is right; the Gods have come down from the Dovrefield; they are abroad. Let us bless our doors."
It was when he had so spoken that upon the main gate of that Hall (a large double engine of foot-thick pine swung upon hinges wrought many generations ago by the sons of the Gods) came a little knocking. It was a little tapping like the tapping of a bird. It rang musically of metal and of hollow metal; it moved them curiously, and a very young man who was of the blood said to his father: "Perhaps a God would warn us."
The keeper of the door was a huge and kindly man, foolish but good for lifting, with whom by daylight children played, and who upon such evenings lay silent and contented enough to hear his wittier fellows. This serf rose from the straw and went to unbar. But the Chief put his hand forward, and bade him stay that they might still hear that little tapping. Then he lowered his hand and the gate was swung open.
Cold came with it for a moment, and the night air; light, and as though blown before that draught, drifted into the hall a tall man, very young, who bowed to them with a gesture they did not know, and first asked in a tongue they could not tell, whether any man might interpret for him.
Then one old man who was their pilot and who had often run down into the vineyard lands, sometimes for barter, sometimes for war, always for a wage, said two or three words in that new tongue, hesitatingly. His face was wrinkled and hard; he had very bright but very pale grey eyes that were full of humility. He said three words of greeting which he had painfully learned twenty years before, from a priest, upon the rocks of Brittany, who had also given him smooth stones wherewith to pray; and with these smooth stones the old Pilot continually prayed sometimes to the greater and sometimes to the lesser Gods. His wife had died during the first war between Hrolf and the Twin Brothers; he had come home to find her dead and sanctified, and, being Northern, he had since been also a silent man. This Pilot, I say, quoted the words of greeting in the strange tongue. Then the tall young stranger man advanced into the circle of the firelight and made a sign upon his head and his breast and his shoulders, which was like the sign of the Hammer of Thor, and yet which was not the sign of the Hammer of Thor. When he had done this, the Pilot attempted that same sign, but he failed at it, for it was many years since he had been taught it upon the Breton coast. He knew it to be magical and beneficent, and he was ashamed to fail.
The Chief of those who were descended form the Gods and were seated round the fire, turned to the Priest and said: "Is this a guest, a stranger sent, or is he a man come as an enemy who should be led out again into the night? Have you any divination?"
"I have no divination," said the priest. "I cannot tell one thing or the other, nor each from the other in the case of this young man. But perhaps he is one of the Gods seeking shelter among men, or perhaps he is a fancy thing, warlock, but not doing evil. Or perhaps he is from the demons; or perhaps he is a man like ourselves, and seeking shelter during some long wandering."
When the Chief heard this he asked the Pilot, not as a man possessing divine knowledge, but as one who had travelled and knew the sea, whether he knew this Stranger and whence he came. To which the Pilot answered:
"Captain, I do not know this young man nor whence he comes, nor any of his tribe, nor have I seen any like him save once three slaves who stood in a market-place of the Romans in a town that was subject to a great lord who was a Frank and not a Breton, and who was hated by the people of his town so that later they slew him. Then these three slaves were loosened, and they came to the house of the Priest of the Gods of that country, and they told me the name of the people whence they sprang. But I have forgotten it. Only I know that it is among the vineyard lands. There the day and the night are equally divided all the year long, and if the snow falls it falls gently and for a very little while, and there are all manner of birds, and those people are very rich, and they have great houses of stone. Now I believe this Stranger to be a man like ourselves, born of a woman, and coming northward upon some purpose which we do not know. It may be for merchandise, or it may be for the love of singing and of telling stories to men."
When he had said this they all looked at the Stranger and they saw that he had with him a little instrument that was not known to them, for it was a flute of metal. It was of silver, as they could see, long drawn and very delicately made, and with this he had summoned at the gate.
The Chief then brought out with his own hands a carven chair, on which he seated the Stranger, and he put into his right hand a gold cup taken from the Romans in a city of the Franks, upon which was faintly carved a cross, and round the rim of which were four precious stones, an emerald, a ruby, an amethyst, and a diamond; and going to a skin which he had taken in a Gascon raid, he poured out wine into that chalice and went down upon one knee as is proper to strangers when they are to be entertained, and put a cloth over his arms and bade him drink. But when the young man saw the cross faintly carved upon the cup and the four precious stones at the corners of it, he shuddered a little and put it aside as though it were a sacred thing, at which they all marvelled. Yet he longed for the wine. And they, understanding that in some way this ornament was sacred to his Gods, gently took it from him and through courtesy put it aside upon a separate place which was reserved for honourable vessels, and poured him other wine into a wooden stoop; and this he drank, holding it out now to one and now to another, but last and chiefly to their Captain; and as he drank it he drank it with signs of amity.
Then by way of payment for so much kindness he took his silver flute and blew upon it shrill notes, all very sweet, and the sweeter for their choice and distance one from another, until they listened, listening every man with those beside him like one man, for they had never heard such a sound; and as he played one man saw one thing in his mind and one another thing; for one man saw the long and easy summer seas that roll after a prosperous boat filled with spoil, whether of fishes or of booty, when the square sail is taken aft by a warm wind in the summer season, and the high mountains of home first show beyond the line of the sea. And another man saw a little valley, narrow, with deep pasture, wherein he had been bred and had learned to plow the land with horses before he had come to the handling of a tiller or the bursting of water upon the bows. And another saw no distinct and certain thing, but vague and pleasurable hopes fulfilled, and the advent of great peace. And another saw those heights of the hills to which he ever desired to return.
But the old Pilot, straining with wonder in his eyes as the music rose, thought confusedly of all that he had seen and known; of the twirling tides upon the Breton coast and of the great stone towns, of the bright vestments of the ordered armies in the market-places and of the vineyard land.
When the Stranger had ceased so to play upon his instrument they applauded, as their custom was, by cries, some striking the armour upon the ground so that it rang, and by gesture and voice they begged him play again.
The second time he played all those men heard one thing: which was a dance of young men and women together in some country where there was little fear. The tune went softly, and was softly repeated, full of the lilt of feet, and when it was ended they knew that the dance was done.
This time they were so pleased that they waited a little before they would applaud, but the old Pilot, remembering more strongly than ever the vineyard land, moved his right hand back and forward with delight as in some way he would play music with it, and thus by a communication of heart to heart stirred in that Stranger a new song; and taking up his flute for the third time he blew upon it a different strain, at which some were confused, others hungry in their hearts, though they could not have told you why, but the old Pilot saw great and gracious figures moving over a land subject to blessedness; he saw that in the faces of these figures (which were those of the Immortals) stood present at once a complete satisfaction and a joyous energy and a solution of every ill. "These," he said to himself in the last passion of the music, "these are true Gods." But suddenly the music ceased, and with it the vision also.
For the great pleasure which the Flute Player had given them they desired to keep him in their company, and so they did for three full years. That is, the winter long, the seed time, and the time of harvest; and the next harvest also, and another harvest more, during which time he played them many tunes, and learnt their tongue.
Now, his Gods were his own, but he pined for the lack of their worship and for Priests of his own sort, and when he would explain these in his own manner some believed him, but some did not believe him. And to those who believed him he brought a man from the South, from beyond the Dovrefield, who baptised them with water: as for those who would not have this they looked on, and kept to their own decree: but there was as yet no division among them. A little while after the third harvest, hearing that the fleet, which was of twelve boats, would make for Roman land, he begged to go with it, for he was sick for his own, but first he made them take an oath that they would molest none, nor even barter with any, until they had landed him in his own land. The Chief took this oath for them, and though his oath was worth the oath of twelve men, twelve other men swore with him. In this way the oath was done. So they took the Flute Player for three days over the sea before the wind called Eager, which is the north-east wind, and blows at the beginning of the open season; they took him at the beginning of the fourth year since his coming among them, and they landed him in a little boat in a seaport of the Franks, on Roman land...
The Faith went over the world as very light seed goes upon the wind, and no one knows the drift on which it blew; it came to one place and to another, and to each in a different way. It came, not to many men, but always to one heart, till all men had hold of it.

Christendom Coolness

2005-12-06T16:57:00.000-08:00

From Anathema to Zucchetto: the ABC's of Heresy and the ABC's of Christendom College (mutually exclusive, of course).

And funny quotes from Christendom students in Rome.

And this has absolutely nothing to do with Christendom, but it's such a righteous cause that I have to plug it somewhere: No More AOL CDs. AOL needs to die a gruesome death.

Catholic anime?

2005-12-02T16:30:00.000-08:00

Okay. Christians making anime should = cool. But this is not the way to go about it...

I must confess: I am a wannabe anime nut. I've only just started getting into individual series - Full Metal Alchemist is the only one I like yet - but the style has always been beautiful to me. And I've always thought that Catholicism + Anime would be a dream come true, although I had to come to this crazy school ^_^ to find people who agree with me. If one searches for "Christian anime" on Google, tons of resources appear, but they are all evangelical. Observe: Anime Angels' Statement of Faith. "Catholic anime" doesn't turn up much. The only example of Catholic-made anime I can think of is the SuperPope short from Phatmass. Cool, but one little flash comic doesn't even scrape the surface of what could be. It's ironic that Protestants should be more into this image-centered business than Catholics. (Here's a page with a lot of evangelical webmanga on it.) Evangelical culture and theology have a huge impact on the anime they make, of course: there's a lot of technical skill and visual panache, but the way they incorporate their Christianity into the story is odd. The images and words are on the same page to be sure, but sometimes they seem weirdly severed. The words are your basic pop evangelical speak, but the images aren't that different from any other anime... right down to the scantily clad female characters. Ahem. Isn't there something just... wrong about this? This is a rather extreme example, but the other wallpapers on this site (called Sanctus Lux, oddly enough) share its schizoid character. Almost all of them have Bible quotes on them... which is fortunate, because most of the images don't have anything specifically Christian about them by themselves.

And this is utterly surreal...

Pentecostal anime?!

I guess it's no wonder that Catholics don't make anime. Anime in America is a subculture to begin with, and enthusiastic Catholics who are also anime fans have got to be rarer than rare. And yet...

A Catholic anime artist could have soooo much fun! All I can really do is doodle, but I've come up with a lot of interesting ideas which I can only dream of turning into art. One of my friends - the first Catholic anime fanatic I ever met - has a phenomenal series idea which we've worked on together, although we know it will probably never see the light of day. It's set around a sort of alternate-universe Constantinople, among these Eastern Catholic-type people and their enemies who make their sons into janissaries. We have all sorts of neat characters and involved plots thought out... there's Athanios, who is trying to find and retrieve his janissary brother Mentiros from the "Turkish" city, and then there's this nomad girl named Favi... I probably shouldn't give any more of it away, just in case my friend decides to make it someday.

I think that Catholic art has more in common with anime than most people would think - especially where there is an Eastern influence, as you might expect. The graceful, stylized look of icons; the elongated figures of El Greco... there are echoes of the anime style here.

Japanese-made anime often uses Catholic terms and imagery, in ways that range from the endearing to the surreal. Catholicism isn't well understood, but nonetheless it has a certain allure. And although anime metaphysics are usually hopelessly muddled, sometimes serious ideas turn up. In Full Metal Alchemist, for example - spoiler! spoiler! - there are seven villains named after the Deadly Sins, and they turn out to be "homunculi", the monstrous results of human attempts to seize immortality through a sort of necromancy. There is a treatment of the idea of making human/animal chimeras that would rattle the most devoted disciple of Peter Singer. On the positive side, there is a beautiful portayal of the family in the characters of Maes, Graecia, and their little daughter Elysia. And then the real fun begins when you start applying Thomist principles about form and matter and the human composite to the series and having crazy arguments... This is not to say that there isn't problematic stuff in the series, but it gives you a taste of what anime could do if its style of art and storytelling were wedded to a coherent metaphysic. For anime has a way of creating iconic images that cling tenaciously in your memory, which can be a good thing as well as a bad thing. What Steven Greydanus says of "Spirited Away" could be applied to a lot of anime: "The effortless visual virtuosity of [its] imagery can make even the strongest animation coming out of Disney or Pixar seem timid and uninspired by comparison. I love the quirky character design in Monsters, Inc., but the mythic power of the imagery in Spirited Away makes Monsters, Inc. look like child’s play."

So... any other anime fans out there? What do you think about this topic which has been so seldom discussed?

Two sketches from my notebook

2005-11-28T13:47:00.000-08:00

Eve of All Saints, 2005

....Sarah and I spent some time wandering in the dark, stargazing. We could see the Milky Way spanning the zenith like a dusty arroyo - the dust being the faintest light - and the other stars seemed to swarm at us, offering us a semblance of eternity, unveiling a place with neither day nor night, north nor south. Distances wherein light is slower than time. A sea so deep that the light of a raging sun will freeze in the offing and wash up here as this frostdire were-light, shuddering, not really illuminating anything. It made me want to bless the dim scarf of light overhead that now seemed like a mother's arm, holding us back from a still greater darkness. And then again, there is nothing fearful in the stars with their eyebeams of Chartres-blue cathedral light, when you remember that the whole universe lies like a little hazelnut in Christ's hand.

evening in early November

Today at sunset everything changed. A Helen-head of cloud rose from the sun, lavender linen, sun-sewn edges, brighter breath of light dispersed through lower part from molten saffron sun. Turn around and face the tree with light full on its crown, red leaves transfigured into something antique seeming, a rusted filigree on a gate to some older Old World where a half-remembered tongue returns at evening in that lost land. And then standing dizzy by the fountain round, behold the light tilted against trees and merging with the autumn mountain where summer sheds its blood and makes an even of its own - yet not harshly, with a rosehip redness and fume of fire that is yet gentle.

Good Modern Poetry

2005-11-06T20:27:00.000-08:00

Some good modern poetry (ie, written by people who are still alive) on the internet:

Pavel Chichikov

Esther Cameron
(I'm quite taken with this neat Metaphysical-style sonnet of hers:)

Love's Catechism

That water may be taught to flow uphill,
The sun to rise out of the western ground;
That lively ichors from cold stones distill,
That our lost years may somewhere yet be found;
That roses blossom at the arctic pole,
That freshets purl across the desert path,
The swift-sent arrow will not find the goal,
Nor the slow tortoise feel Achilles' wrath;
That there may be two hills without a dale,
That lions may be taught to draw the plow,
That moth-wings make invulnerable mail,
That war-ships founder on a drowned man's brow:
All these false things true lovers must believe,
For the world wears worse, when these illusions leave.

Actually, the Hypertexts website in general is useful.

And now a thought about the Ballade...

I've seen a lot of poets writing sonnets and sestinas and villanelles lately, but not very many ballades, which is a shame, because it's a form capable of great emotional effects. Observe: Ballade to Our Lady of Czestochowa by Hilaire Belloc; A Ballade of Suicide by GKC. Actually, villanelles and sestinas are usually kind of annoying. Sonnets are awesome. In short, I want to read more ballades.

Christendom Quotes, etc.

2005-11-06T20:17:00.000-08:00

"Even before baseball, they knew there was something sacred about the number three." - Dr. S.

Also, Sheila's account of Medieval Fest.

Please to remember the fifth of November...

2005-11-05T16:50:00.000-08:00

Happy Guy Fawkes Day, everyone!

This sounds like fun. Not that I endorse it or anything. (Mwa ha ha!)

An African and an American disagree on ordaining women.

2005-11-03T07:56:00.000-08:00

Via Diogenes, this bit of NCR cluelessness.

I picked up the phone to hear a precise French accent pleading, “Peg, tell me it is not so!”

“What is not so, Abena?”

“On the news they say they will ordain a woman as priest. How can this be in the Catholic church? All day I pray, ‘Jesus, how can a woman be priest?’

“ ‘Call Peg,’ he said. ‘She will give you peace.’ So, I know you are a woman of wisdom and faith. Tell me, how can this be?”

“Abena, in the current Roman Catholic church this cannot be. Perhaps they mean some other church or an unrecognized ordination.”

“Oh, thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Peg. Not our Roman Catholic church!” She was laughing, nearly giddy with relief. “I prayed, ‘Lord, take me now if this should happen.’ I would rather be dead than see such a thing.”

“Abena,” I sighed with regret, “You and I will not live to see such a day in our Catholic church. This will not happen in our lifetime.”

“Oh, thank you! You give me so much hope and happiness.” But, suddenly serious, she said, “I think this cannot happen ever -- as it was in the beginning it shall be in the Catholic church until Jesus comes again.”

Her distress evident, she continued:

“I do not know why women keep trying to be Jesus. They should try only to imitate the example of humility and obedience of our Blessed Mother.”

“Abena, are you saying that men should not try to imitate the example of Mary?”

I struggled to contain my anger. And I succeeded because this was Abena, a very simple woman, not a bishop, the pope or a Vatican spokesperson, all of whom, I think, should have a broader view of church history and the place of culture in determining our ever-evolving, collective understanding of God.

She laughed readily, “Of course, we all should. But what is more important is that women learn the beauty of raising children.

“Just today God has answered my prayer. The husband of a sister of ours planned to divorce her because she has not been pregnant in many years. I learned today that she is two months with child. God is so good!”

My blood nearly boiled at the sexist content of this assertion and her archaic proof of God’s mercy. Yet, I forgave her immediately because I recognized that she is a product of her culture. Only recently from Cameroon, she was jailed there for her faith. Shackled, she was beaten on the soles of her feet. Now, walking is difficult. Wearing shoes is still painful.

“They wanted to break my spirit,” she laughed when she told me. “They only strengthened my faith!”

She is temporarily here, illegally, an accident of clerical errors (or the truest intervention of the grace of God), awaiting deportation so she can return to spread the Gospel to prisoners until she is again jailed and, as she anticipates, tortured to death. As she awaits deportation, she cares for dying women in their homes. Between chores, she prays the rosary many times a day. Paid in cash by grateful families, she lives on handouts, saving the money to send basic necessities like soap, underwear and food to her beloved prisoners. “In Cameroon,” she said, “if you have no family to care for you while in prison, you die. We are all family in Jesus,” she said. “So, we must care for these brothers and sisters.”

This reads like a conversation from a Michael O'Brien novel. It seems too perfectly ironic, stark, and revealing to be real. Nevertheless, it is.

"I think this cannot happen ever -- as it was in the beginning it shall be in the Catholic church until Jesus comes again.”

"I struggled to contain my anger. And I succeeded because this was Abena, a very simple woman, not a bishop, the pope or a Vatican spokesperson, all of whom, I think, should have a broader view of church history and the place of culture in determining our ever-evolving, collective understanding of God."

Peg fancies that there is no real discord between her beliefs and Abena's beliefs ("I felt profoundly blessed as Abena pointed to the truth in her own experience without condemning the truth in mine"), but in reality there is a great gulf fixed between these two women.

And I am no better than Peg, because I say that I believe what Abena believes, but I am still living my comfortable and complacent little life. Abena and her sisters will save the world. Peg should have longed to kiss her beaten feet.

Medieval Fest

2005-10-29T16:43:00.000-07:00

Here are the promised pictures from Christendom College's 2005 Medieval Fest.

The library was decorated with the banners which my roommate Stephanie made.

Many students and families attended.

Stephanie in front of the result of her hard work.

My "stained glass windows" in the commons.

St. Joan of Arc. In hobbit proportions. (Argh!)

Luthien rose window.

We watched a morality play written by my friend Sheila, titled Piers Freshman (after Piers Plowman, the poem that the sophmore class loves to hate). Piers Freshman, on a quest for GPA, is accosted by various figures such as Student Activities Council,

Work Study,

Alcohol,

and Sleep.

After seeking guidance from the Dean,

he learns to make friends with Legion [of Mary] and Shield [of Roses].

These lead him to Dame Study,

and her elusive friend, GPA, who gives him a diploma. Hurrah!

Other attractions were the Disputed Question (hilarious!), madrigal singing, and the pig roast:

More pictures:

Cider stand

Some Students with their English Professor. I'm standing next to the Saracen Maiden.

My friend Sarah. She was a different kind of medieval. Watch out for that katana!

Friends Megan (left), Stephanie (right), and Sheila (sitting).

My other friend Sarah, and myself.

Trid Love Song

2005-10-26T17:47:00.000-07:00

Boeciana of Laodicia sings a romantic trad hit:

You're the top,
You're the Roman Canon;
You're the top,
You're the Creed in Latin;
In illo tempore
starts every story
you tell;
You're a chanted Ave,
a solemn Salve,
a Sanctus bell....

^_^

What Obsolete Skill Are You?

2005-10-26T17:08:00.000-07:00

Regularly Metric Verse

You are 'regularly metric verse'. This can take many forms, including heroic couplets, blank verse, and other iambic pentameters, for example. It has not been used much since the nineteenth century; modern poets tend to prefer rhyme without meter, or even poetry with neither rhyme nor meter. You appreciate the beautiful things in life--the joy of music, the color of leaves falling, the rhythm of a heartbeat. You see life itself as a series of little poems. The result (or is it the cause?) is that you are pensive and often melancholy. You enjoy the company of other people, but they find you unexcitable and depressing. Your problem is that regularly metric verse has been obsolete for a long time.

What Obsolete Skill Are You?

Yessss! I thought I was going to get "Latin," but this is even better. The little blurb is mostly bosh, though. "Not been used much since the nineteenth century" - do the names Yeats, Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, or Dylan Thomas ring a bell? And there is iambic pentameter in The Waste Land, so ha! Ezra Pound was mad on dactyls. And Seamus Heaney (who has the distinction of not being dead) has written sonnets. I think that most "free verse" is full of meter, even though the time signature keeps changing, so to speak. But regularly metric verse thrives today in the form of song lyrics, which is really as it should be, when you think about it.

Any friend of Hopkins is a friend of mine.

2005-10-25T20:42:00.000-07:00

Now this looks fun: Dappled Things - a "Catholic Literary Magazine for Young Scholars." I've just got to send them something! The introduction on their site is neat:

Letter from the Editor

"Glory be to God for dappled things," writes the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins in the poem "Pied Beauty," first naming things literally colored with contrasting speckles and patches: streaked skies, spotted trout, great fields sectioned and ploughed and planted. He then extends his definition of "dappled" to mean

"…[a]ll things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim…"

According to Hopkins, dappled things are those things we find irregular and surprising that are in fact lovelier and more lovable for their being irregular and surprising. We can think of an infinite number of such strangely beautiful things: the patches on an overripe fruit, a sudden slow and sad passage in a song, even the inexplicable peace that comes of suffering. These "dappled things," things at once "swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim," confound our human love for safety, thwart our wish to see unblemished fruit, to listen to music that does not carry us away, to live a life without challenge. How can it be that we grow to love things that once made us uncomfortable, that we rejoice in things we once found imperfect? How is it that the things, the events, and the men that the world finds weakest and worst often give rise to the greatest joy? It is a mystery, in the fullest sense of the term, and "Pied Beauty" delights in it.

We at Dappled Things delight, too: in that mystery, and in the genius of Gerard Manley Hopkins, that he can muse in a poem on "skies of couple-color as a brinded cow" and yet through that poem hint at the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. For surely that is the most dappled thing in all human history, the strangest and the most beautiful, at once "swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim."

The Psalmist invites us, "Come, let us sing to the Lord, and shout with joy to the Rock who saves us!" We the editors of Dappled Things invite you, our Catholic brothers and sisters, to sing and shout in our pages about our dappled world. Write about spotted trout and brinded cows, or write about the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. We ask only that your work be inspired by your love for Him and His Church in the fullness of her Scripture and Tradition, her sacraments, and her communion of saints.

Mary Angelita Ruiz

Editor-in-Chief

It's very new - the first edition will be published this December. I'm always on the prowl for good modern poetry, and this looks promising. Thanks for the link, Matthew!

Freedom!

2005-10-25T19:37:00.000-07:00

I return at last. No, I wasn't eaten by a bear, kidnapped by Mexican bandits, or crushed by a giant Latin dictionary falling from the sky... well, almost. The Latin midterm was postponed, thank God, but I still had three others in English, theology and philosophy - as well as a history paper. Many people tried to convince our theology professor to move his exam - but to no avail. We did manage to wring a promise out of him: if the Mother of God and the three Archangels appeared to him and told him to move the exam, he would obey. Some students began praying feverishly. But as Cardinal Wolsey said in A Man for All Seasons, "there is prayer - but there is also action!" Several enterprising students surprised the professor before class on the day of the test, presenting him a scroll with impressive Gothic lettering all over it. His response was rather deflating.

"I can tell the difference between the Mother of God and Olivia R. with a pillowcase on her head. They teach you these things in graduate school."

Alas, the test was on.

Many other students were bitten by the mysterious Midterm Moose (don't ask me why a moose), contracting flu, hacking coughs and migraines at the optimally inopportune time of the night spent studying for next day's test.

I pulled through - barely. On Saturday, euphoric at having finished my hellish week, I went home with my roommate and began what should have been a glorious week-long break. But it was not to be. I had foolishly volunteered to make decorations for Medieval Fest (which will be this Saturday), and I promptly converted my room into a one-woman sweatshop. How hard could it be to make three "stained glass windows" out of posterboard and tissue paper with a persnickety glue bottle and a dull Exacto knife? Never mind...

The last window isn't quite finished, but will be soon. Two of them are large rose window-looking things, featuring (and this is my private joke) the heraldic symbol designed by Tolkien for Luthien of Doriath! The other window shows St. Joan of Arc, looking suspiciously anime-ish. I'll have some fantastic pictures up this Saturday.

Odd and Whimsical Christendom Quotes.

2005-10-25T19:33:00.000-07:00

"Our God is not like the other gods, a nuclear reactor god, on whom we can push ritualistic buttons!" - Mr. J.

They're everywhere!!!

2005-09-25T15:42:00.000-07:00

Blogs by Christendom students, I mean. I finally gave them their own subsection in the links. If you want to get a slice of Christendom life, these are the blogs (and one message board) to visit. Destination: Order was one of the first Christendom blogs... the first? Only Therese knows. After Fiddleback Fever came on the scene, though, the number of Christendom blogs appeared to mushroom. My list isn't exhaustive, and I'll probably add to it from time to time, but I think I caught most of them.

What drove me to do this? The opening of a Christendom Rome blog: Vestal Morons, by the inimitable John and Julian. This will no doubt be a very cool and weird blog, seeing as it is run by Hamlet and the Kaphoozle King. Watch this blog... if you dare.

Clothesline... Oh yeah!!!

2005-09-25T15:39:00.000-07:00

"So... Aeneas was really just Trojan trailer trash?" - S.F.

Rock Band Names

2005-09-18T13:03:00.000-07:00

Another contribution to the art.

Snail Vapors
Squeaky Zucchini
Shao-Lin Jesuit Assassins
Mostly Donkey
Chocolate Novena
Chronocide - What Mark Twain wanted to commit in A Connecticut Yankee.
Super Duper Counter Reformation Cup - Buy it now at Fr. Sibley's!
Drunken Hobbits Are People Too
Ambrose and the Cannibal Groundhogs - Ask my logic class about that one.
Goatface Killer
Deutscher Hardcore Katholizismus - Pope Benedict starts a German metal band?
Gnarly Flamethrower Brunettes
Bagpipe Dynasty
Marshmellow Death March
Papercup Mixmaster
Superlative Carwash
Injection Molded Carrots
Sindarin Rosary
Zombie Corn
Double Prestidigitation
Lunar Angst
Elizabethan Shoe Bomber - Don't try this at home: sneaking into England with papal bulls in your boots.

The Return of the Clothesline

2005-09-18T13:00:00.000-07:00

"I just wish the Holy See had a nuclear arsenal... we could get so much territory back." - Dr. M.

Hagia Sophia, Boromir & Hobbes, etc.

2005-09-12T10:32:00.000-07:00

If Turkey has to join the EU, we should at least get Hagia Sophia out of it.

Okay okay, so it would be the Greek Orthodox Church that would get Hagia Sophia out of it. But heap coals on their head and sign this petition anyway.

The Last Mass in Hagia Sophia

Anonymous Song of Lamentation
for the Fall of Constantinople in 1453.
Translated by Richard Stoneman

God rings the bells, earth rings the bells, the sky itself is ringing,
The Holy Wisdom, the great church, is ringing out the message,
Four hundred sounding boards sound out, and two and sixty bells,
For every bell there is a priest, for every priest a deacon.
To the left the emperor is singing, to the right the patriarch,
And all the columns tremble with the thunder of the chant.
And as the emperor began the hymns to the Cherubim,
A voice came down to them from the sky, from the archangel’s mouth:
Cease the Cherubic hymn, and let the sacred objects bow;
Priests, take the holy things away, extinguish all the candles:
God’s Will has made our city now into a Turkish city.
But send a message to the West, and let them send three ships:
The first to take the cross, the second to remove the Gospel,
The third, the finest shall rescue for us our holy altar.
Lest it all to those dogs, and they defile it and dishonour it.
The Holy Virgin was distressed, the very icons wept.
Be calm, beloved lady, be calm and do not weep for them.
Though years, though centuries shall pass, they shall be yours again.

Let it be so!

* * *

I've just discovered an excellent Polish artist who makes beautiful Tolkien art. Most of the pictures involve either Silmarilion characters or those two dashing sons of Denethor... as kids! She has also made a series of parody comic strips where little Boromir creates havoc instead of Calvin. Very funny.

* * *

Last week, Christendom College celebrated its annual Italian night. Some 15 students stayed all Friday night in the kitchen, baking bread and throwing flour at each other, and on Saturday Fr. Heisler blessed the bread and we broke out the burgundy. By ten o'clock the dancing under the moon had begun, and I watched the Papist debauch from a distance with two of my friends, who were wanting company in their antisocialness. (Don't ask me about the logic of that!) From what I heard the next day, it was much like last year's Italian night, except without the soapsuds. The Irish Mafioso made his second appearance. In case this year's Italian Night doesn't get a write-up, I am linking to Sheila's droll article on Italian Night Past. Enjoy!

Remember this day.

2005-09-11T16:08:00.000-07:00

And pray for your country.

Piers Plowman: A 14th Century Howl

2005-09-09T12:08:00.000-07:00

"Good riddance to bad rubbish!" My friend Sheila had just finished her essay on the notorious Piers Plowman, and she was glad to see it end. When Medieval Fest comes around she plans to throw her copy of William Langland's magnum opus onto the bonfire - and I doubt she'll be the only one to do so. That poem is the most rambling, confusing thing I've ever been made to read. If all of the characters in the Canterbury Tales had sat down together and tried to write the Divine Comedy, they might have come up with something like Piers Plowman. It's an immense screed about politics, economics, and ecclesial corruption in the form of a mass of dream-visions and rotating casts of allegorical characters like "Lady Mede" and "Repentaunce" and "Suffre-thi-Sovereyns-to-haven-hir-wille:Deme-hem-noght-for-if-thow-doost-thow-shalt-it-deere-abugge;Lat-God-yworthe-with-al-for-so-His-word-techeth." And so on. I found the original Middle English to be predictably more euphonious - but I just can't cotton to this wannabe-Wycliffian medieval moonbat. I'm more of a Beowulf person: hero should kill monsters, get treasure, drink beer, go home. Now that's a satisfying storyline.

T.S. Eliot wrote Harry Potter?

2005-08-30T12:35:00.000-07:00

From Cacciaguida: The Waste Land becomes an HP filk.

What are the plot-threads that clutch, what subplots grow
Out of this pulpy rubbish? Son of James,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
Your third-person limited perspective, where your adverbs breed,
And the caps lock gives no shelter, the chapter no relief,
And the seventh book no sign of surcease. Only
There is a horcrux inside this dark cave,
(Come into the waters of this dark cave),
And I will show you something different from either
Your battles fought previous where someone did help you
Or your battles to come which you must face alone;
I will show you fear in a cupful of juice.

Now We Are Sophmores

2005-08-29T12:31:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm finally back on my feet at Christendom College. My jetlag is gone, my stuff has been redeemed from storage, and I am painfully adjusting to the insane weather and giant bugs. Would you believe that it can be hot and foggy at the same time here? One should only be able to observe this phenomenon in the shower, but today I went outside at 7:30 in the morning and encountered a mysterious vapor that was more steam than fog. To make it even more hellish, these crazy Easterners keep their buildings at about 40 degrees farenheit all the time, so that your brain freezes over in Latin class and your glasses fog up when you come out.

Ah well. Soon it will be fall again, the bugs will die (yessssss!), and the trees will do that thing they do on this side of the country. Every tree will look like an upturned paintbrush and the Blue Ridge mountains will go Red with turncoat abruptness. It will be my second real Fall, far from the autumn of California "where the leaves fall not - land of my people forever." At Christendom there is a different aspect of Elvendom to be found. Soon I will be walking through the dark towards a star of fire tangled in the trees like the solitary lamp in a dark church, and between the falling leaves I will discern notes and spectral voices. When I reach the clearing, though, this forbidding air of Faërie will disperse, and there will be Peachy with his concertina and Sheila with her tin whistle and, if she can be summoned, Christina with her harp that the wind plays when she's not looking, that breathes inanimate music and reveals the architecture of the air. In Christina's hands that harp becomes a tower full of bells, or a wheel spinning thread out of flame. When the song ends a bodhran will strike up a running rhythm in the shadows, and my violin will turn fiddle and dance a reel instead of a minuet. And then there will be the singing of a score of voices while the sparks shoot starward. Let 'The Four Green Fields' be sung, and 'The Black Velvet Band;' and may Peachy and I get through all ten verses of 'The Old Orange Flute' without people throwing things at us.

::shocked silence::

Come on people! It's a funny song!

Outlaw Catholicism!

2005-08-12T18:35:00.000-07:00

Wow. Now I understand why Canadian Catholics always sound so apocalyptic. Victor Morton posts about a retired Canadian professor who went on Radio Canada and basically called for Catholicism to be outlawed. The transcript of his modest proposal may be found here.

This guy is fascinating. He's like the missing link between Relativist Man and Fascist Man.

SecretAgentMan! Help!

Introduction:

Men and women within the Roman Catholic faith are still hoping that the church can change to more accurately reflect the World in which we live.This week-end, for example, an international conference will be held in Ottawa to support women's equality in religions. WOW, or Women's Ordination Worldwide, is fighting for the ordination of women in all Christian Churches. It says it wants to open a global debate on the issue.

And some were hoping for reform during the period when the old pope was dying and the new pope was being anticipated.

Bob Ferguson is a retired professor from the Royal Military College. He believes that Catholics are unlikely ever to see changes in policy on birth control or on the question of married or female priests. In fact, he says change won't come until the churches are forced to comply with the same human rights legislation that affects the rest of society.

Bob Ferguson:

Given the inertia of the Catholic Church, perhaps we could encourage reform by changing the environment in which all religions operate.

Couldn't we insist that human rights, employment and consumer legislation apply to them as it does other organizations? Then it would be illegal to require a particular marital status as a condition of employment or to exclude women from the priesthood.

Of course the Vatican wouldn't like the changes, but they would come to accept them in time as a fact of life in Canada. Indeed I suspect many clergy would welcome the external pressure.

We could also help the general cause of religious freedom by introducing a code of moral practice for religions. They will never achieve unity so why not try for compatibility? Can't religious leaders agree to adjust doctrine so all religions can operate within the code?

I am an engineer so the model I am thinking about is rather like the provincial acts regulating the practice of engineering. For example, engineers must have an engineering degree from a recognized university or pass qualification exams. They must have a number of years of practical experience and pass an ethics exam. The different branches: mechanical, electrical, civil and the like have a code of practice that applies to everyone. Why can't religious groups do the same?

I envisage a congress meeting to hammer out a code that would form the basis of legislation to regulate the practice of religion. Like the professional engineers' P.Eng designation, there would then be RRPs (or registered religious practitioners). To carry the analogy to its conclusion, no one could be a religious practitioner without this qualification.

I won't try to propose what might be in the new code except for a few obvious things: A key item would have to be a ban on claims of exclusivity. It should be unethical for any RRP to claim that theirs was the one true religion and believers in anything else or nothing were doomed to fire and brimstone. One might also expect prohibition of ritual circumcisions, bans on preaching hate or violence, the regulation of faith healers, protocols for missionary work, etc.

Now what is the point of proposing this? I do it because I am worried that the separation between church and state is under threat. Religion is important in our lives, but it can become a danger to society when people claim that the unalterable will of God is the basis for their opinions and actions. Yes religion can be a comfort and a guide, but we cannot take rules from our holy books and apply them to the modern world without democratic debate and due regard for the law.

Disturbing Quizzes

2005-08-12T02:40:00.000-07:00

You scored as Severus Snape. Well you're a tricky one aren't you? Nobody quite has you figured out and you'd probably prefer it stayed that way. That said you are a formidable force by anyone's reckoning, but there is certainly more to you than a frosty exterior and a bitter temper.

Severus Snape

80%

Remus Lupin

70%

Albus Dumbledore

55%

Ginny Weasley

55%

Ron Weasley

55%

Hermione Granger

55%

Harry Potter

50%

Sirius Black

35%

Lord Voldemort

35%

Draco Malfoy

35%

Your Harry Potter Alter Ego Is...?
created with QuizFarm.com

Well... that... was freaky. But not entirely unexpected. So how did I manage to get Lucy Pevensie over at this Narnia quiz?

As Lucy Pevensie, you may be quite timid and shy, but your heart is in the right place! You make sure you tell the truth, even if it results in embarrassment.

Narnia Personality Test

It actually took me a few tries to get Lucy; I kept getting Puzzle:

Puzzle is a well-meaning, good-hearted donkey. He’s not very intelligent and is extremely gullible. Usually he just does whatever he’s told, because he assumes others know better. Still, he wants to do what’s right and never means anyone any harm.

I beg to differ with the "not very intelligent" part... but the rest is pretty on the money. Erm, yeah. The synopsis doesn't mention that Puzzle happened to be the pawn of the Antichrist, though. I never liked The Last Battle as a child; it was so frustrating that no one could stop that stupid Ape and burn down the stable. So the world had to come to an end. The only things I liked about the book were the last few pages - and King Tirian.

If I could be any Narnia character, I'd be King Tirian. He's like C.S. Lewis's take on Faramir. I guess it's something to work towards...

Oddly, Snape has always been one of my favorite HP characters. I don't like him per se, but he's just so enigmatic, infuriating, and pitiable. You're always wanting to get to the bottom of him, but he continues to... er... surprise you.

Life Imitates Blog

2005-08-08T21:04:00.000-07:00

(I should have written this two weeks ago, but so much has been going on... oh well. Here it is anyway.)

When I was in New Mexico a couple of weeks ago, I went to see Ainadamar at the Santa Fe Opera House. I had just finished translating Lorca's Romance Sonambulo. And what turned out to be the opera's subject? Why, Lorca, of course! My mom had chosen the opera because it was a recent work, and therefore cheaper to see.

The Santa Fe Opera House is unique. It is in the middle of a big lonely ranch with only the dry mountains for miles around. Its sides are open so that you can see the lights and the lightning on the mountains at night, and sometimes the rain and snow come in. There is a reflecting pool curving around the edge of the orchestra pit which throws a watery light on the stage and helps the acoustics somehow. I would hate to be in that orchestra pit in winter - they cover it to keep the snow out, but I bet it's still cold.

The opera itself was a mixed bag. There was some excellent singing and memorable music, but the plot was vague, the costumes were boring, the staging was stupid, and the libretticist was a cretin. Seriously, a lot of the dialogue sounded as though it had been transcribed from mouldering Soviet propaganda posters. Once again, Lorca had become a symbol of gay this and leftist that, and scant attention was given to his poetry. It was sad. The scene of Lorca's execution was so drawn out that there was something of a perverse delectation in it. They had Lorca cowering and crying at the approach of the soldiers, which definitely angered me. I don't think that Lorca would have given them that satisfaction. There were ham-fisted allusions to the Passion of Christ, but they didn't add up to a real spiritual insight. Still, there was one scene which managed to catch something of Lorca the poet. Lorca and Margarita Xirgu are in a bar in Madrid, talking about his new play, Mariana Pineda. Margarita congratulates Lorca on writing such a useful political work, but Lorca protests that the play is not political. He sings of how he fell in love with Mariana's statue when he was nine years old, and how her lips turned red in the moonlight outside his window.

I will never be political. I am a revolutionary because there are no true poets that are not revolutionaries. Don’t you agree? But political, I will never, never be.... I am on the side of the poor.

Ironically, Ruiz Alonso had the most stunning music in the opera. When he came to arrest Lorca his voice was like a bonfire roaring in the wind, flickering with innumerable quarter tones. His singing has been compared elsewhere to the call of a muezzin. The song that the chorus kept singing - "How sad it was in Granada, the stones began to cry..." - was good, and I still remember the tune. But someone needs to tell the stage director that if he wishes to have the effect of a Greek chorus, he should eliminate the silly hand motions from the song. These ladies are not in kindergarten anymore, and the song is perfectly comprehensible without the gestures. If the girls in the chorus are going to move at all, their motions should be suitably rigid and tragic. Oh, and put some long sleeves on those black dresses, because it looks really stupid when everyone's arms are all white and bulgy looking:

I wonder if Erik Keilholtz has any opinions about Lorca... or his fiery translator, Roy Campbell - that soldier and maker of satirical epics. It must have been all those broadcasts of Franco they used in the opera that made me think of that question. ::cough::

After the opera there was an amusing incident. My mom spotted a car in the parking lot with a prolife bumpersticker and another sticker that said "I (heart) the Old Latin Mass," and she goaded me into asking the driver where he had found it. (No idea how she managed that...) I went over and peered quizically into his window, and he jumped in alarm. He looked to be a college student, and there were at least two other people in the car, all of the same age. (I'm not sure because it was dark and I was suddenly feeling silly.) The girl next to him convinced him to roll down the window, and I asked him sheepishly where he had purchased his vehicular proclamation of POD'ity, to which he answered, "San Ignacio in Albuquerque." I thought of adding, all in one breath, that I was not a crank and that I had been put up to this by my mother, but I knew that it would be no use. So I thanked him and went back to our truck. (Nor did I tell him that my family is going to move to Albuquerque in the near future, and that we are thinking of joining the parish of San Ignacio! Wow, I wonder if he would have called the police? ^_^ )

All this makes me wonder, though, if that gentleman is one of the parishioners of St. Blog's and I met one of my favorite writers by accident! He certainly seemed like he could be a Catholic Blogger.

"Long time ago in the faraway galaxy..."

2005-08-08T19:44:00.000-07:00

This is hilarious: a bootleg Chinese DVD of Revenge of the Sith with wacked-out English subtitles. "Revenge of the Sith" is rendered as "Backstroke of the West," "the Jedi Council" as "the Presbyterian church," and there are mysterious references to elephants and augury. At first I thought it had to be a fake, but apparently there are plausible explanations for the weirdness: for instance, the Chinese word for "West" sounds a lot like "Sith."

A Bit of Dialogue

BATTLE DROID: Superior, they have escaped a day after the fair.

GENERAL GRIEVOUS: I should really feeds you all dog.

ANAKIN: Space general, you and not equal to I think severe.

Combined with the screen shots... well, let's just say that it leaves "All Your Base" in the dust. Whew.

snark

2005-08-01T23:07:00.000-07:00

Via Philokalia Republic, Kevin Grace trounces the latest Ex-Irishman with a Ponderous Memoir of Life in Neolithic Eire. It's a bad sign that it took me more than five seconds to realize that this was a parody:

A great tramping, barracking, bollocking man was our Father O'Pression. His writ ran the length and breadth, the highways and the byways, the up hill and the down dale of County Tooraloora. And to be sure, any of us boys at Saint Miseryguts had only to whisper a hint of a glimmer of a fancy of what we all wanted to do to witty, pretty Kitty McMahon behind Finnegan's cowshed, when then, as sudden as the rains that fell from the shimmering, slatey-grey clouds above, he would appear before us, as tall and as terrible as old Finn MacCool himself, stinking of the bacon sandwiches he stuffed in his soutane, of the Jameson's he swigged from a battered pewter flask and of the lack of the deodorant he damned as a wicked Protestant innovation, the wrath of a thousand Dies Iraes in his eyes, etc etc.

The sample from the actual memoir is rather more muted, but it still runs through the same checklist used by everyone writing a crappy knockoff of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Let's see...

1. Random emotional breakdown and flight from Creepy Irish School, intended to be both funny and damning. (Hint: is neither.)

2. Casual yet Significant mention of girls playing by convent school.

3. Picturesque superstition concerning ghosts of executed Irish rebels.

4. Picturesque superstition concerning Catholicky things (i.e., the narrator's mother, in the midst of hanging laundry on the line - oh! the medæval darkness! the patriarchy! woe! - exclaims "Jesus Mary and Joseph!" on seeing her son appear in the back garden).

5. Precious description of some household artifact that can probably be purchased in a kitsch-mongering catalog titled "Celtic Treasures" or the like.

Slap a re-tinted black and white stock photo on the cover and you're ready to go! Wow, now I'm wanting to write one myself...

Oh, and get this: the tome's title, "A Great Feast of Light," refers to the light pouring from the gazillion new televison sets that apparently descended like a cathode-ray Pentecost on the darkling isle of Eire and swept her clean of priestcraft. Perhaps Doyle will write a sequel in praise of the enlightenment that will ensue when Paddy discovers the joy of scarfing a box of Krispy Kreme dougnuts in his SUV and buying crates of cheap Chinese junk at his local big box.

Would somebody fisk the review? Pretty pleeeeeeeeeeeeeze?

Happy Birthday, Father Hopkins!

2005-07-28T17:36:00.000-07:00

Gerard Manley Hopkins will become the patron saint of this blog if he is ever canonized. Here's to a great poet, a great Jesuit, and a great Englishman! (These three things are rare enough by themselves; Hopkin was sui generis.)

His poems may be found here. This is one of my favorites:

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection

CLOUD-PUFFBALL, torn tufts, tossed pillows ' flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-
built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs ' they throng; they glitter in marches.
Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, ' wherever an elm arches,
Shivelights and shadowtackle in long ' lashes lace, lance, and pair.
Delightfully the bright wind boisterous ' ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare
Of yestertempest’s creases; in pool and rut peel parches
Squandering ooze to squeezed ' dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches
Squadroned masks and manmarks ' treadmire toil there
Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, ' nature’s bonfire burns on.
But quench her bonniest, dearest ' to her, her clearest-selvèd spark
Man, how fast his firedint, ' his mark on mind, is gone!
Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark
Drowned. O pity and indig ' nation! Manshape, that shone
Sheer off, disseveral, a star, ' death blots black out; nor mark
Is any of him at all so stark
But vastness blurs and time ' beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,
A heart’s-clarion! Away grief’s gasping, ' joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. ' Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; ' world’s wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, ' since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ' patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.

Prayer Request

2005-07-27T23:00:00.000-07:00

I just got home from visiting my grandparents in New Mexico, and I should be asleep, but I wanted to ask all of you to please pray for my grandmother who will be having surgery tomorrow. Just an Ave or two as you read this would make me very grateful.

Thank you.

At last... the elusive Latin blog

2005-07-24T16:19:00.000-07:00

Don Jim of Dappled Things links to a blog written in Latin (well, with some Greek and French thrown in). Unfortunately, I am very bad at Latin, and can hardly read any of it. If I don't resume my studies soon, I will have to stop claiming Catholic Nerd Status, and that would be insufferable.

Green, Green, Green

2005-07-19T20:09:00.000-07:00

I did it. I finished my translation of Frederico Garcia Lorca's Romance Sonambulo. What I mainly learned from the experience was that it is really hard to write line after line with feminine endings in English. I also learned that most people who translate Lorca (and they are legion) must not be trying very hard to even aproximate the sound of the original. It can be done, to some extent. Here is the original beautiful Spanish. The thing about Lorca is that he is not as surreal as he seems. He uses very bizarre but illuminating metaphores, and he is very rooted in his homeland of Andalucia. I just wish I knew Spanish better... I must buy Roy Campbell's study of Lorca. It was so good.

Romance Sonambulo
by Frederico Garcia Lorca

Green oh how I love you green.
Green the wind. Green the branches.
The ship on the flowing sea
and the horse on the side of the mountain.
Submerged to the waist in shadow
she dreams on her veranda,
green her flesh and green her hair,
with eyes of frozen silver.
Green oh how I love you green.
Under the gypsy moonlight,
Each thing turns its gaze to her
and she cannot return them.

Green oh how I love you green.
Stars of frost unfolding
come out with the fish of shadow
that opens the road of the morning.
The fig tree chafes at the wind
with the sandpaper of its branches,
and the mountain, a cat creeping,
bristles its bitter hackles.
But who will come? And from where...?
She lingers on her veranda,
green her flesh and green her hair,
the bitter sea all her dreaming.

- Compadre, I want to exchange
my packhorse for your house,
my saddle for your mirror,
my knife for your warm blanket.
Compadre, I come bleeding
from the mountain gates of Cabra.
- If only I could, young man,
I would do it; have no doubt.
But now I am no more I,
nor is my house my house.
- Compadre, I want to die
in my own bed, decently.
My bed with its frame of iron,
covered with linen sheets.
Do you not see the wound I have
from my throat to where my heart beats?
- Three hundred darkening roses
are on your white shirt.
Your blood and the scent of it thicken
rounding your sash about.
But now I am no more I
nor is my house my house.
- Then let me go up, at least,
up to the high verandas.
Let me climb there! let me rise
up to the green verandas.
Balconies of the moon
whence the water rumbles and dances.

Now the two friends are climbing
up to the high verandas.
Leaving a trail of blood.
Leaving a trail of tears.
Trembling on the rooftops
were little tinleaf lanterns.
And wounding the new day dawning,
a thousand crystal tambours.

Green oh how I love you green,
green the wind and green the branches.
The two friends finished climbing.
The long wind went by, leaving
in one's mouth the strangest savor
of gall, mint, and sweet basil.
Compadre! Where is she, tell me,
where is your bitter girl?
How many times she awaited you!
How many times did she wait for you here,
cool her face and black her hair,
on this green veranda!

Over the face of the cistern
the gypsy girl was swaying.
Green her flesh and green her hair,
with eyes of frozen silver.
An icicle of moonlight
sustained her upon the water.
The night became as intimate
as a little village plaza.
Drunks from the Guardia Civil
were at the door, knocking, knocking.

Green oh how I love you green.
Green the wind. Green the branches.
The ship on the flowing sea.
And the horse on the side of the mountain.

I have always loved this poem for its cadences and its strange images that seem to come straight from the uncertain hours before dawn. Reading it, I feel as though I am keeping a vigil and falling in and out of sleep.

In regard to this poem, Lorca said "If you ask me why I wrote 'A thousand tambourines of crystal wounded the dawn,' I will tell you that I saw them in the hands of trees and angels, but I cannot say more: I cannot explain their meaning. And that is how it should be. Through poetry a man more quickly reaches the cutting edge that the philosopher and the mathematician silently turn away from."

I have read several explanations of it - some of them far-fetched - but it describes what could be a real situation. Basically it's about a gypsy smuggler of the sort that haunted a certain region of Andalucia. His girlfriend waits for him every night on her balcony, and one night he is late. He has gotten into an altercation with the Guardia Civil, and he is mortally wounded. He comes back to the house of a friend. The girl, meanwhile, has heard the commotion in the hills. She thinks he's dead, and throws herself into the cistern in despair. A bunch of drunken Civil Guards show up at her house, thinking they will find the smuggler there... It's a kind of gypsy "Romeo and Juliet." Lorca's poem is a twist on an established tradition of ballads about these bandits. He knew the traditional themes, images and meters of his country well, which is one source of his poetic greatness.

This is an insightful post about the Romance Sonambulo and Lorca in general.

I am still not happy about the word veranda, because it means "porch" more than it means "balcony;" but it had the right sound. Very similar to baranda. Tambour is also a little too unnatural - it should be tambourine, but I couldn't let go of it because it fulfilled the meter and the assonance nicely. I really tore my hair out over "Leaving behind a trail of blood. / Leaving a trail of tears." In Spanish it is the beautiful and rhythmic

Dejando un rastro de sangre.
Dejando un rastro de lágrimas.

But I couldn't find anything that worked better. Leaving manta, "blanket," to chime with "Cabra" was also pretty desperate. Oh well. At any rate, I think my version worked out. I especially like the second section, and the lines

An icicle of moonlight
sustained her upon the water.
The night became as intimate
as a little village plaza.

Does anyone else like Lorca?

The Speech of the True West...

2005-07-18T21:34:00.000-07:00

...is Quenya, of course; "Elf-Latin." Tolkien's invented language contains words of numinous beauty, and I discovered a few more of them today. I thought it would be fun to give my violin a name, and because I am a big nerd, I wanted it to be elvish. But not a Legolas-fangirl sort of elvish - you know, "My name is Alqualondë Calatarilírinen!" Like Sam, I wanted a name that you wouldn't have to cut short before you could use it. Also like Sam, I chose a name that could pass as an English one. He chose "Elanor," I chose "Elen." One of my violin's previous owners carved a small star into it, and Elen means star. Besides the little star, there is the violin's voice: sweet and girlish, with stellar high notes (pun intended). If I'm feeling fancy, I can call her Elerrína - "star-crowned."

As I was searching on an Elvish wordlist, I found the Quenya word for "grace": Erulissë. Literally: God-sweetness. I also found Ainasúle, which means "the Holy Spirit." Tolkien translated the Ave Maria into Sindarin - I think that someone should translate the Salve Regina into either Sindarin or Quenya. It would probably begin "Aiya Airetári," but that's as far as I can take it. And I'm sure there's a vocative in there...

I need to get back to studying Latin.

Ha!

2005-07-18T20:35:00.000-07:00

I told you so.

Catholic Church Stands Up for Harry Potter

Vatican Radio Transcript

The Best Articles on Harry Potter

2005-07-18T16:14:00.000-07:00

I know that most of you are sick of hearing about Harry, but I feel obligated to defend Mrs. Rowling from truly unfair attacks. I think that all of these articles are much fairer to Harry Potter than, say, Michael O'Brien's articles.

Regina Doman on Harry Potter

Character, Choice, and Harry Potter

Fantasy and the Occult in Children's Literature

History According to Harry (This one is certainly... creative.)

The Candy Man (This is about Roald Dahl, not HP - but I think it proves that HP is nothing out of the ordinary when it comes to children's lit. When are we going to see all the Catholic critiques of James and the Giant Peach? Or Matilda? I think those books permanently warped my mind... ^_^ Not to mention The BFG and The Twits, which are two of the grossest books I've ever read. They make the humor in HP seem the apogee of taste.)

Harry Potter and the Half-Baked Pratings

2005-07-16T15:30:00.000-07:00

Okay... so when is the dire poisoning of my Christian imagination going to kick in? I have been reading the Harry Potter series since I was 13 years old, yet I remain a perfectly orthodox Catholic, lover of the Latin Mass, and defender of POD'ity everywhere. I am pretty sharp when it comes to smelling rotteness in Denmark, but Harry Potter has never set off my Darkside Detector, despite the model calibration of my imagination's compass.

Michael O'Brien himself could not quibble with my literary upbringing. My mother starting reading to me as soon as my googly infant eyes could focus on a page, and I seldom watched TV. (I still don't and always won't, in saecula saeculorum.) I read Andrew Lang's Red Fairy Book when I was seven (Tolkien also read it as a child), and my mother read me The Hobbit when I was eight. It instantly became my favorite book of all time, and was only supplanted by The Lord of the Rings, which I read at age 12. In between those two Tolkien classics I read the Narnia books, Dickens, Poe, and whatever else I could get my hands on. Some of it was dreck - I am thinking of the endless Baby Sitter Club books I consumed in fifth grade - but most of it was truly good literature.

So how did I become obsessed with Harry Potter when I was in middle school? You can't blame it on the television I never watched and the vacuous pop culture I never immersed myself in. What made me read each successive book in a single gulp, haunt HP messageboards, talk about nothing else with my friends; write esoteric trivia questions, fanfiction, poetry? I lost my obsessive interest in the series after the fourth book, but I remembered it fondly. And two days ago I finally picked up the fifth book - and ended up reading it through the night and finishing as the sun rose the following day. (To be honest, I do that with every book that piques my interest.)

I think I can explain how the Catholic fracas over Harry Potter erupted. It was not in response to the book itself...

Sequence of Events

1. The Harry Potter books became hugely popular among young readers such as myself. This baffled adults who could not comprehend the spectacle of American kids reading long, heavy books of their own volition. There had to be some hidden gimmick!

2. Inevitably, Harry Potter set off the hair-trigger sensibilities of those poor people who think that Halloween was created by devious, Isis-worshipping papists.

3. The media gleefully gave the fundy book-burnings way more coverage than they deserved. There's nothing the media likes better than making Christians look stupid, so this was another obvious development.

4. Here's where it gets hairy (ha ha). The Onion, satirizing the nascent hysteria, put up an article featuring fake "quotes" from children who had supposedly started worshipping Satan after reading HP. The fundies thought it was real, and attacked the books even more fiercely. The media responded with more ridicule. And so the flames rose higher as the fundies and the media bounced off each other. Did I say flames? I should have said smoke: as the brawl intensified, more and more sensible religious people began to think that where there was smoke, there had to be hellfire.

5. Catholics began to take notice of the fracas. They learned of it through the media, and assumed they had seen it all before: some sort of neo-pagan fad being defended by an anti-Christian media. They joined in the condemnations. Being rather more analytical than the mainstream media, they began paging through the books, trying to find the source of the evil craze. Although Harry Potter would not have attracted their suspicions without the media frenzy, they dug up all sorts of sinister things from its pages. Why? Because there was a cloud of smoke and there just had to be fire underneath. The smoke blew across the Atlantic and even Rome smelled something burning. A few statements from important and revered churchmen - who were hearing of the controversy from several removes - confirmed the concerned Catholics in their distrust of Harry Potter. Now they will not be parted from it by a crowbar.

That is what has happened, as far as I can tell. Under all the sound and fury, however, are the books themselves. And the Catholics who are concerned about them have never given them a truly unbiased look.

Why are they so popular? I must confess that until now I have never sat down and asked myself that. Here are a few reasons I like them, and I think that they are pretty widespread reasons.

1. They are just so British. This may seem like an odd thing to go crazy over, but it is true. Think of all the children's literature that comes from England: The Wind in the Willows, The Secret Garden, Mary Poppins, Peter Pan, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory... and on and on, right up to CS Lewis and Tolkien himself. America may export its movies and television, but the UK sends us their literature. JK Rowling is just the latest shipment. (Well, actually Lemony Snicket is. I have never read A Series of Unfortunate Events, but I expect that a lot of its popularity comes from its Britishness. Philip Pullman - a man I have an immense aversion to - probably trades on it as well.) The Britishisms, the boarding-school scenario... it all seems exotic and yet familiar. The language, too, is a draw: the evocative names and Latin spells appeal to the same part of the mind that is delighted by Hobbiton, Lothlorien, Dwarrowdelf, and O Elbereth Gilthoniel. In short, American kids have always liked English fantasy. It's a tradition of sorts.

2. Harry Potter is this normal boy who finds out that he has special powers and gets whisked away to have adventures. Children like these kind of stories. Period. Of course there is the danger of gnosticism and elitism, but the HP books guide children away from these temptations by downplaying the importance of Harry's natural abilities and heightening the importance of his moral choices. In the fifth book, Harry becomes filled with pride at his accomplishments and anger at the suffering he has experienced. He hurts his friends and makes himself miserable. Slowly and painfully he begins to realize the truth about himself. At the end of the book his pride is definitely humbled, but the anger remains, and he is not yet out of danger. So we worry not only about the dangers to his life, but about the state of his soul. Harry Potter is not a perfect hero; he is not someone who has been a saint from the beginning of the story. He is like us: he is struggling towards perfection. And Rowling is not afraid to show us his struggles.

3. The sheer richness and invention of Rowling's subcreation. It doesn't have the grandeur of Tolkien's subcreation, but it is charming and complex in its own right. Rowling truly creates a seperate world: it must be reached through countless wardrobe-like doorways: a train station, a telephone booth, a hidden alleyway. Inside, one finds a jewel box of creatures, customs and gadgets. Quidditch, invisibility cloaks, portkeys and penseives. Unicorns, dragons, house-elves and centaurs. Butterbeer, the Weasley twins' joke shop, anamagi, Remembralls, phoenixes, talking portraits... It is a world in which a thousand fairytales can rub shoulders in humorous situations.

4. The characters. Hermione of the Eternally Raised Hand and Ready Answer, with her outbursts of righteous anger and a vulnerable side that we rarely see. Dumbledore, obviously inspired by Gandalf, with his wisdom and goodness and slightly alarming whimsy. (Like Gandalf, he has a habbit of disapearing at inconvenient times.) Neville Longbottom, a "small person" who seems lumpish and timid, but who is enduring terrible inner suffering. The walking enigma that is Snape - he seems so villainous, but Dumbledore trusts him. And Harry himself, the Boy Who Lived. You care about him. You worry about him. You get angry at him when he does the wrong thing, and feel proud of him when he does the right thing. In other words, you love him.

That's all there is to it, really. There's no subliminal message, no sinister hypnotic gimmick that makes kids read it and warps their souls. It's just so much better than the horrid, horrid YA novels they made us read in school - those little Newberry Award-stamped paperbacks that wallow in despair and banality. I don't know anyone who liked reading those things.

If you really want to worry about the paganization of children's literature, you can worry about stuff like, oh, this. Or my own personal least favorite, the Anti-Narnia. Why isn't Michael O'Brien attacking the "Atheist CS Lewis?" Harry Potter may not be a full-blown Catholic allegory, but its snakes are where they should be.

Elevenses

2005-07-13T14:43:00.000-07:00

I thought it odd that the little Roy Campbell poem which I posted below had eleven lines. I mean, that's kind of random, isn't it? You think it's going to be some sort of sonnet, but it isn't.

Looking through my own poems, though, I found several eleven-liners. Weird...
Here's one of them:

Evening Finds Me by the Library Window

The sun falls into the surge of trees
and pulses in the flickering
airy currents of the leaves.
Falls the cool light of underseas.
The sun-warmed cherry desk exhales
a ghost of color, precipitously darkens,
and a faint coolness palls the room.
The soul flutters a little in its nest,
then settles, foreknowing like the rest,
but comprehending not the test that comes,
the thing that flight entails.

I wrote this in Christendom's library last year, when I was supposed to be studying. How could anyone not stare out this window?

I owe one to Da Blogfather...

2005-07-12T15:16:00.000-07:00

...aka my brother the computer genius. Thank you for fixing my blog!

"I'm buyin' you a pizza."

Or... how about I bake you a pie? Yes, I think I'll do that.

Jones and his Companion Animal

2005-07-11T16:17:00.000-07:00

Ohhhhhhhhh Chesterton. How did you become so prescient?

The Horrible History of Jones

by G.K.Chesterton

Jones had a dog; it had a chain;
Not often worn, not causing pain;
But, as the I.K.L. had passed
Their 'Unleashed Cousins Act' at last,
Inspectors took the chain away;
Whereat the canine barked 'Hooray!'
At which, of course, the S.P.U.
(Whose Nervous Motorists' Bill was through)
Were forced to give the dog a charge
For being Audibly at Large.
None, you will say, were now annoyed,
Save, haply, Jones - the yard was void.
But something being in the lease
About 'alarms to aid the police,'
The U.S.U. annexed the yard
For having no sufficient guard.
Now if there's one condition
The C.C.P. are strong upon
It is that every house one buys
Must have a yard for exercise;
So Jones, as tenant, was unfit,
His state of health was proof of it.
Two doctors of the T.T.U.'s
Told him his legs, from long disuse,
Were atrophied; and saying 'So
From step to higher step we go
Till everything is New and True.'
They cut his legs off and withdrew.
You know the E.T.S.T.'s views
Are stronger than the T.T.U.'s:
And soon (as one may say) took wing
The Arms, though not the Man, I sing.
To see him sitting limbless there
Was more than the K.K. could bear.
'In mercy silence with all speed
That mouth there are no hands to feed;
What cruel sentimentalist,
O Jones, would doom thee to exist -
Clinging to selfish Selfhood yet?
Weak one! Such reasoning might upset
The Pump Act, and the accumulation
Of all constructive legislation;
Let us construct you up a bit - '
The head fell off when it was hit:
Then words did rise and honest doubt,
And four Commissioners sat about
Whether the slash that left him dead
Cut off his body or his head.

An author in the Isle of Wight
Observed with unconcealed delight
A land of just and old renown
Where Freedom slowly broadened down
From Precedent to Precedent.
And this, I think, was what he meant.

Another Good Poem I'd Forgotten About

2005-07-11T15:08:00.000-07:00

Here is a beautiful little poem by Roy 'Strider' Campbell (You Tolkien fanatics out there know the reason for the cognomen).

Mass at Dawn

I dropped my sail and dried my dripping seines
Where the white quay is chequered by cool planes
In whose great branches, always out of sight,
The nightingales are singing day and night.
Though all was grey beneath the moon's grey beam,
My boat in her new paint shone like a bride,
And silver in my baskets shone the bream:
My arms were tired and I was heavy-eyed,
But when with food and drink, at morning-light,
The children met me at the water-side,
Never was wine so red or bread so white.

I just like the last line so much. The little chiasmus of rhymes is a great ending flourish. (Something similar happens in Hopkins' Spelt from Sybil's Leaves: "black, white; right, wrong...")

The poem has a dreamlike atmosphere, a tinge of Lorca to it. Roy Campbell championed and translated Lorca's poetry, and it seems to have rubbed off on him. The nightingales in the quay remind me strongly of Lorca anyway.

A Catholic Poet Discovered

2005-07-09T16:21:00.000-07:00

I own an eclectic little book of Christian verse titled Garlands of Grace. Most of the poets are familiar to me, but there are some modern poets in it that I know absolutely nothing about. One of them, Johann Moser, is represented by a single, beautiful poem that I have remembered ever since I read it. I finally decided to search the net for some information on this poet, and was startled to realize that he was the editor of O Holy Night, a collection of Christmas poems that I love. I found a book of his poetry on Amazon, which I intend to buy. This is the poem below. The last two replies are my favorite.

Bordeaux, 408 A.D.
(in two voices)

"At anchor in the harbor, now,
Galleys of the western fleet prepare to sail.
The sun rides low beyond the ocean;
On our table, a cruet of Burdigalan wine
Glows firey-red in evening light,
And we watch the somber nightfall
Lean its brow upon the sea."

"Should we not prepare to leave as well?"

"Where would we go?
The Augustan legions are withdrawn;
The Rhine frontier has fallen.
Like bats in a gutted tower,
The foederati flutter through the empire
Seeking a blackened perch amid the ruins.
And Alaric turns his raven eye
Down the Flaminian viaducts,
Down to the Alban Hills, and - dare I say it? -
'The walls of lofty Rome.'
The stays of the imperium cannot hold."

"But the matter of perpetuity!"

"Ah, we can but cherish what has been bestowed;
We can but praise what lived before us,
And will yield its gracious foison to the ages.
Perpetuity renders us,
But is not ours to render; all human excellence
Alone is quarried in the hands of God.
But look, upon the darkening waves,
The galleys trim their starboard lamps."

"When will they depart?"

"They sail with the tide, those ships;
They will not come again.
Lucinius has joined them.
He stuffed his earthen jars with scraps:
Souvenirs of the old campaigns -
A battered eagle or two, medallions from Trier.
What does it matter? He sails for Spain.
The barbaroi will be there to meet him.
Shall he embark for Africa?
Numidian grain-fields shall be red with blood
Before he unpacks his wares."

"And us?"

"...compose the hymns
Which they at morning will intone
To laud the new-born sun, the ancient land,
The same ripened apples
Loaded into carts at harvest-time.
Someday they too shall walk these hills
And take the poplars for their song
And sing a lady's beauty.
Someday they too shall aptly raise
Basilicas of thought into the heavens."

"Until then...?"

"Until then...?
The wine, my friend, a final cup;
The night is growing heavy,
And I must homeward bend my way
To stave my lids, my weary soul,
Against that long-encroaching,
That dark and ageless sea.
May Roman peace betide us
Among the solemn groves,
The sepulchres of our fathers in their sleep."

There's so much I feel like saying about this poem, but it wouldn't add up to the impact of the poem itself. I'm so happy, though, to be discovering another Catholic poet. I haven't been this excited since I found Pavel Chichikov. Readable modern poetry is incredibley scarce today, but most of it seems to be written by Catholics. And that, as Gandalf said, may be an encouraging thought.

For another look at "the dark and ageless sea," go to my friend Sheila's blog and check out her three part series on that dark and Tolkienesque poem, "The Seafarer."

A Tale of Two Portraits

2005-07-03T15:31:00.000-07:00

One of the coolest things I saw in New York was the Frick Collection. It's a small and intimate museum, and it displayed works by almost all of my favorite artists: Vermeer, El Greco, Velasquez... My favorite work was Holbein's portrait of St. Thomas More. It was displayed in an interesting way: it was hanging to the left of a large fireplace, and on the other side was Holbein's portrait of Thomas Cromwell - the man who destroyed the monasteries and took over Thomas More's position when he resigned.

It was almost like the two of them were looking at each other. The colors and details were so much clearer than in these images - there is nothing like seeing the original of an artwork! The brown-looking cord behind Thomas More is actually a deep scarlet. His velvet sleeves look almost like real velvet. And his face...

Holbein wasn't intending to produce an icon when he made this potrait. But I felt as though I were looking at one. As I stood in front of it, I thought: Holbein was looking into Thomas More's face, into his eyes, nearly five hundred years ago. He was painting just what he saw. It's like I'm seeing Thomas More's reflection. So I just looked and looked for the longest time. His eyes were incredibly steadfast. His mouth was serious, but it was impossible to resist the vision of a smile flashing over his face. You could imagine him relaxing from that carefully aranged pose, laughing and coming over to see what Holbein had created. Holbein really caught something of his character, as described by Erasmus in a wonderful letter:

His countenance is in harmony with his character, being always expressive of an amiable joyousness, and even an incipient laughter and, to speak candidly, it is better framed for gladness than for gravity or dignity, though without any approach to folly or buffoonery.... In human affairs there is nothing from which he does not extract enjoyment, even from things that are most serious. If he converses with the learned and judicious, he delights in their talent, if with the ignorant and foolish, he enjoys their stupidity. He is not even offended by professional jesters. With a wonderful dexterity he accommodates himself to every disposition. As a rule, in talking with women, even with his own wife, he is full of jokes and banter. No one is less led by the opinions of the crowd, yet no one departs less from common sense.

I just love St. Thomas More.

Just Scroll Down...

2005-07-01T14:57:00.000-07:00

Does anyone know why my sidebar has shoved my posts down? (Evil opressive chauvinist sidebar! Hmph!) And why has the Shrine of the Holy Whapping been blown to kingdom come? How will I survive without my daily fix, huh? Has Blogger recently messed with the template that we both use?

Stupid computers.

Saints in the City

2005-06-30T10:00:00.000-07:00

When we were walking through Lower Manhattan, we came upon this little church wedged between two huge skyscrapers. It turned out to be the shrine of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton. Inside, it was stunningly quiet after the the roar of construction and traffic outside, and I could see the branches of trees swaying and rustling through the stained glass over the altar. A beautiful place - a Eucharistic heart beating silently in the breast of Lower Manhattan.

Guess where I was!

2005-06-28T12:33:00.000-07:00

I'm really really sorry about the long silence on this blog. There's been so much going on... anyway, I just got back from NEW YORK!!!!!!!

And why was I in New York?

*takes deep breath*

To hear my little sister sing in CARNEGIE HALL, that's why!!!!!!!!!!!

She sang with her choir. My favorite pieces were "Think On Me" (a heart-wrenching poem by Mary Queen of Scots) and "South Sami Song" (a piece by a Norwejian composer which involved some very intense drumming and conjured up visions of vikings rampaging around in their long ships. Very cool!)

We visited the Cloisters on the northern tip of Manhattan and saw the Unicorn Tapestries. Can you believe that this is New York?

My little sister

Me sitting by a window

Honeysuckle

Jack Chick Buys Garfield?

2005-06-08T19:39:00.000-07:00

From Lark News.

"Then Roland blew his Olifant and really lost his mind!"

2005-06-05T07:54:00.000-07:00

Erik Kielholtz should like this one...

From Fiddleback Fever, Bowman the Black's Parody Songs of Roland, to the tune of "The Battle of New Orleans" and "Gaston."

He blew that horn and the Muslims kept a-commin’
There wasn’t quite as many as there was a while ago
He blew once more and they began a-runnin’
O’er Gibralter Rock and down to Morocco!

Must be seen to be believed.

GrazieGrazieGrazie!!!

2005-05-25T18:49:00.000-07:00

Saint Anthony, you are the greatest! Thank you for saving my bacon yet another time and restoring my purse to me!

And thank you, kind honest person who found my purse outside the Starbucks on that seedy corner of El Camino and brought it inside. I wish I knew who you were...

Aliens in This World on Catholic Fandom

2005-05-21T22:31:00.000-07:00

An insightful post at an insightful blog: When Religion is Your Fandom. I've come to realize the danger of this during the past year, especially after my first year at Christendom, where I had the privilege of participating in a living breathing Catholic culture, as opposed to staring feverishly at blogs on my computer screen until the ungodly hours of the night.

And this blogger also has a song parody titled "Chant in Latin." I'm afraid I don't know the original, but it's still funny and elegant:

Everyone knows some hymn
we'd be better off without;
We'd best not say what's lame.
OCP might be about.
But why commit your budget,
and risk your range's strain,
When a little chant in Latin
is all public domain? ....

This blog goes back to 2002! Why haven't I seen it before?

Okay, okay, okay...

2005-05-18T21:55:00.000-07:00

...I'll do it! ^_^

Total Number of Books I’ve Owned:
Maybe 200. Yes, I'm pathetic. But my mom has such a huge library that I usually just read her books...

Last Book I Bought:
I bought three books from Amazon: collections of poetry by Pavel Chichikov and George Mackay Brown, and a surreal sci-fi novel by Poul Anderson called High Crusade, in which space aliens invade medieval England and get their butts kicked by a bunch of knights, who commandeer their ship and defeat their tyrannical empire. The book is narrated by a lovable monk named Brother Parvus, and it puts the smackdown on that stupid Connecticut Yankee meme, whereby scruffy, superstitious medievals can be terrorized with an electric can opener.

Last Book I Read:
Evelyn Waugh's biography of Edmund Campion. It was truly amazing. I love St. Edmund Campion, and Waugh's writing is fabulous. Of course the college bookstore started selling it at the same time I was reading it. Sigh...

Five Books that Mean a Lot to Me:

1. The Lord of the Rings. A no brainer; it's been my favorite book since I was 12. If it doesn't keep me sane and and ardent for the verum/bonum/pulchrum, nothing will.

2. The Path to Rome. The best thing Belloc ever wrote. That I've read, anyway. It's so full, so satisfying for every mood. It combines the sacred and the profane, irony and artlessness, sorrow and consolation in equal measure. And you can read it online, so there's no excuse. (However, you won't get the wonderful songs and sketches sprinkled through the book.)

3. The Diary of a Country Priest. I'm always astonished at how intricately structured this book is. The melancholy is almost fatal to me, but I keep coming back for more. It is a saint's story, but so artistically told. An unusual combination.

4. The Red Fairy Book. I loved this collection of fairy tales when I was a kid, especially The Twelve Dancing Princesses and The Nettle Spinner. They made a very deep impression on me. For what it's worth, Tolkien also read it as a child.

5. Heaven, by Peter Kreeft. I read this when I was 14, I think. It completely changed my superficial understanding of Heaven, and of the purpose of our Faith. It tied together all these things I loved - music, Tolkien, etc. - and showed me why I loved them and where they were leading.

And I guess it isn't a book, but the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Cloister Farrago

2005-05-17T10:59:00.000-07:00

So I was reading this cool book about the Holy Grail, and I get to a section about the monastery of San Juan de la Peña, where the Holy Grail was sheltered from the Moors for a time. This monastery is amazing - Romanesque cloister as Navajo cliff dwelling? Check out the pictures:

That weird freestanding cloister sorta reminds me of the little garden by the Houses of Healing in Return of the King:

Which also reminds me: some movie reviewer described Minas Tirith as "a cross between Mont Saint Michel and the Hoover Dam." The Mont Saint Michel part is true enough:

Views from Mont Saint Michel cloister.

Pretty close, except for the pointed arches. Minas Tirith is definitely a Romanesque city. I've noticed something cool about the throne room in Minas Tirith, something that reinforces the idea that Aragorn's return would be analogous to the restoration of the Holy Roman Empire. The throne room looks suspiciously like the cathedral at Aachen which holds the throne of Charlemagne. See...

Throne room at Minas Tirith

Cathedral of Aachen

***

Cool, no?

To war!!!

2005-05-05T17:54:00.000-07:00

There will probably be no posting here for a week... finals start tomorrow. I have finals for

-Logic
-Latin
-Dante
-Scientific Thought
-Theology
-and History (covering the medieval period).

Fr. M's theology final is tomorrow, and it will be brutal. Ora pro me.

May Magnificat via Phatmass?

2005-05-03T19:35:00.000-07:00

I really should be translating the Exultet for Latin class, but I think I'll slack off and post Gerard Manley Hopkins instead.

(Bwa ha ha! Only at Christendom could I be so weird and seem so normal... ::accelerated radio anouncer voice mumbles the names of TAC, Steubenville, Ave Maria etc. to preempt the indignant comments::)

I love Hopkins' "May Magnificant," and so does my friend Sheila. However, we have an odd way of showing it.

How could I know that Sheila had such an irreverent streak? This is someone who has memorized all 280 lines of "Wreck of the Deutschland." So I was stunned when she started rapping "May Magnificat" out of the blue one day.

I joined in, and now we will rap it in unison at the slightest provocation.

The May Magnificat

MAY is Mary’s month, and I
Muse at that and wonder why:
Her feasts follow reason,
Dated due to season—

Candlemas, Lady Day;
But the Lady Month, May,
Why fasten that upon her,
With a feasting in her honour?

Is it only its being brighter
Than the most are must delight her?
Is it opportunest
And flowers finds soonest?

Ask of her, the mighty mother:
Her reply puts this other
Question: What is Spring?—
Growth in every thing—

Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
Grass and greenworld all together;
Star-eyed strawberry-breasted
Throstle above her nested

Cluster of bugle blue eggs thin
Forms and warms the life within;
And bird and blossom swell
In sod or sheath or shell.

All things rising, all things sizing
Mary sees, sympathising
With that world of good,
Nature’s motherhood.

Their magnifying of each its kind
With delight calls to mind
How she did in her stored
Magnify the Lord.

Well but there was more than this:
Spring’s universal bliss
Much, had much to say
To offering Mary May.

When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple
Bloom lights the orchard-apple
And thicket and thorp are merry
With silver-surfèd cherry

And azuring-over greybell makes
Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes
And magic cuckoocall
Caps, clears, and clinches all—

This ecstasy all through mothering earth
Tells Mary her mirth till Christ’s birth
To remember and exultation
In God who was her salvation.

There's something beautifully medieval about the poem:

"Ask of her, the mighty mother:
Her reply puts this other
Question: What is Spring?—
Growth in every thing—"

Hopkins has a sort of innocence and un-self-consciousness about his poetry that expresses itself in the most innovative and artful language. One of the wonderful paradoxes of Hopkins.

Are YOU a Philistine?

2005-05-01T20:20:00.000-07:00

"He would be sort of grand too, pulling in lonely state across the noon, rowing himself right out of noon, up the long bright air like an apotheosis"

Heh heh. Quizes to see if you're one of the elite few who can tell Faulkner's prose from Goethe edited by Babelfish. Among other things.

I got 58% right on the Faulkner one, probably because I've never read Faulkner. I got 75% right on all the others. Nice try, slipping some of Hitler's watercolors in there. Insipid little pastel postcards; much too obvious.

Someone wake me up from this nightmare...

2005-04-28T18:50:00.000-07:00

Fr. Pavone describes Teresa Schiavo's last hours.

You know what the most ironic thing was? There was a little night table in the room. I could put my hand on the table and on Terri's head all within arms reach. You know what was on that table? A vase of flowers filled with water. And I looked at the flowers. They were beautiful. There were roses their and other types of flowers and there was another one on the other side of the room at the foot of the bed. Two beautiful bouquets of flowers filled with water. Fully nourished, living, beautiful. And I said to myself, this is absurd. This is absurd. These flowers are being treated better than this woman. She has not had a drop of water for almost two weeks. Why are those flowers there? What type of hypocrisy is this? The flowers were watered. Terri wasn't. The other irony is - had I dipped my hand in that water and put it on her tongue - the officer would have led me out probably under arrest. He would have certainly led me out of the room. Something is wrong here.

As you may have also seen, those who killed Terri were quite angry that I said so. The night before she died, I said to the media that her estranged husband Michael, his attorney Mr. Felos, and Judge Greer were murderers. I also pointed out, that night and the next morning, that contrary to Felos' description, Terri's death was not at all peaceful and beautiful. It was, on the contrary, quite horrifying. In my 16 years as a priest, I never saw anything like it before.

After I said these things, Mr. Felos and others in sympathy with him began attacking me in the press and before the cameras. Some news outlets began making a story out of their attacks and said I was "fanning the flames" of enmity and hatred....

One of the attacks they made was that a "spiritual person" like a priest should be speaking words of compassion and understanding, instead of venom. But compassion demands truth. A priest is also a prophet, and if he cannot cry out against evil, then he cannot bring about reconciliation. If there is going to be any healing between these families or in this nation, it must start with repentance on the part of those who murdered Terri and now try to cover it up with flowery language.

Father StrongBad?

2005-04-25T13:21:00.000-07:00

Cool story from Saintly Salmagundi about a Mexican priest who became a wrestler to raise money for his orphange.

Happy Saint Mark's!

2005-04-25T12:36:00.000-07:00

If you're a Venetian, you'd better be partying today!

Carolingian Chorus from the Rock

2005-04-24T12:18:00.000-07:00

Today the College celebrated the election of Benedict XVI at the 10:00 Sunday Mass. It was a Mass to remember. The bells started ringing and students in their Sunday best began flooding into the chapel. As the priests and deacons and acolytes processed in, we sang "Long Live the Pope!", that deliciously triumphalistic hymn. They really need to update it though. It's "a thousand million," not "three hundred million voices," hymn people. Sheesh. Get with the times. ^_^

There were blazing candles and blue arabesques of incense... gold fiddlebacks... the usual row of altar... guys? holding up red lamps on poles at the Consecration. The choir and schola sang from the loft and everyone in the pews bellowed the Missa de Angelis Credo and Sanctus, shattering (as we do every Sunday) the notion that Catholics can't sing. (I keep wanting to quote The Quiet Man: "Now, I want you all to cheer like Protestants!") The Kyrie, Gloria and Agnus Dei were from Byrd's Mass for Four Voices, there were Gregorian propers, and a few other polyphonic pieces here and there including O Sacrum Convivium, by I don't know who. The sermon went over the Holy Father's sermon today, especially these words:

The pastor must be inspired by Christ’s holy zeal: for him it is not a matter of indifference that so many people are living in the desert. And there are so many kinds of desert. There is the desert of poverty, the desert of hunger and thirst, the desert of abandonment, of loneliness, of destroyed love. There is the desert of God’s darkness, the emptiness of souls no longer aware of their dignity or the goal of human life. The external deserts in the world are growing, because the internal deserts have become so vast.

Of course I couldn't help thinking of TS Eliot and Choruses from the Rock:

You neglect and belittle the desert.
The desert is not remote in southern tropics
The desert is not only around the corner,
The desert is squeezed in the tube-train next to you,
The desert is in the heart of your brother.

And then there is the answer:

Let me show you the work of the humble. Listen.
In the vacant places
We will build with new bricks
Where the bricks are fallen
We will build with new stone
Where the beams are rotten
We will build with new timbers
Where the word is unspoken
We will build with new speech
There is work together
A Church for all
And a job for each
Every man to his work.

Every man to his work! That was the gist of Father's sermon today. Then came the consumation of all POD'ity: At the end of Mass, we sang the Carolingian Acclamations in honor of Pope Benedict XVI. They seem to be synonymous with the Laudes Regiae, and I think they really do go back to Charlemagne's time. Now, I have sung these only once before, at Our Lady of Peace in Santa Clara sometime around Easter. And I've seen them printed in the Liber Cantualis we use at the College. They are the giddiest piece of Gregorian chant I've ever sung, and they run something like this:

Cantores: Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat.

Omnes: Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat.

I
Cantores: Exaudi, Christe. Omnes: Exaudi, Christe.

Cantores: Ecclesiae sanctae Dei, supra regnorum fines nectenti animas: salus perpetua!

Cantores: Redemptor mundi. Omnes: Tu illam adiuva.

Cantores: Sancta Maria. Omnes: Tu illam adiuva.
C: Sancte Joseph. O: Tu illam adiuva.

II
Cantores: Exaudi, Christe. Omnes: Exaudi, Christe.

Cantores: Benedicto, Summo Pontifici, in unum populos doctrina congreganti, caritate: Pastori gratia, gregi obsequentia.

Cantores: Salvator mundi. Omnes: Tu illum adiuva.
C: Sancte Petre. O: Tu illum adiuva.
C: Sancte Paule. O: Tu illum adiuva.

III
Cantores: Exaudi, Christe. Omnes: Exaudi, Christe.

Cantores: Paulo episcopo et omni clero sibi commisso pax et virtus, plurima merces.

Cantores: Sancte Timothe. Omnes: Tu illum adiuva.
C: Sancta Katerina. O: Tu illum adiuva.

Omnes: Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat.

Cantores: Rex regum. Omnes: Rex noster.
Cantores: Spes nostra. Omnes: Gloria nostra.

IV
Cantores: Exaudi, Christe. Omnes: Exaudi, Christe.

Cantores: Magistratibus et omnibus concivibus nobiscum orantibus: cordis vera quies, votorum effectus.

Cantores: Auxilium christianorum. Omnes: Tu illos adiuva.
C: Sancte Michael. O: Tu illos adiuva.
C: Sancte Benedicte.(!) O: Tu illos adiuva.

Omnes: Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat.

Cantores: Ipsi soli imperium, laus et iubilatio, per infinita saecula saeculorum.
Omnes: Amen.

Cantores: Tempora bona habeant! Omnes: Tempora bona habeant redempti sanguine Christi!

Cantores: Feliciter!
Omnes: Feliciter!
Omnes: Feliciter!

Cantores: Pax Christi veniat! Omnes: Regnum Christi veniat!

Omnes: Deo gratias. Amen.

My friend Stephanie summed it up in one word: "Tribal." You had to be there to hear the schola, deacons and people cheerily trying to outshout each other, raising the roof of the chapel. "Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat"... that's carved on the side of the obelisk in St. Peter's Square. I've seen it myself. "Tempora bona heabeant!" Sorta the Latin equivalent of "Let the good times roll!" It's too bad I can't find a translation or music online. (Come to think of it, I can't find a complete version of Choruses from the Rock either. Huh.) But Catholic Encyclopedia has this super-nifty article on the Acclamation, and how it originated from Republican Rome. Lots of fun!

Cool Blogs

2005-04-23T14:20:00.000-07:00

There are several blogs that I have been meaning to introduce for a long time, and I keep forgetting too. But I will do it now!

Enchiridion - This is the blog of SHEILA, my friend and fellow Christendom student. On it you will find lovely commentary on all sorts of poetry, particularly Hopkins, Tennyson and Chesterton.

¿Qué? - Yet another Christendom blog! Happy and silly.

Jade's Trick - My cousin runs this blog and he writes movie reviews. Most creative rating system I've ever seen.

Now go visit!

"The Beautiful is the Good."

2005-04-23T12:54:00.000-07:00

The Babylonian starlight brought
A fabulous, formless darkness in;
Odour of blood when Christ was slain
Made all platonic tolerance vain
And vain all Doric discipline.

(from Yeats)

Benedict XVI wrote this back when he was Cardinal Ratzinger. (My thanks go to The Idyllist!) It is really stunning and it addresses all these questions that have been plaguing me for so long. In addition to having written this insightful piece on beauty, Benedict XVI is also a Mozart lover, according to George Weigel. I'm liking him more every day!

The fear that, in the end, it is not the dart of beauty that leads us to truth, but that falsehood, the ugly and vulgar, constitute the real “reality” has caused men anguish throughout time.... In Christ’s Passion, Greek aesthetics, so worthy of admiration because of its perceived contact with the divine, which yet remains ineffable for it, is not removed, but overcome. The experience of beauty has been given a new depth, new realism. He who is beauty itself let Himself be struck in the face, spat upon, crowned with thorns–the Holy Shroud in Turin can help us imagine all this in a moving way. But precisely in this face, disfigured in this way, the authentic, ultimate beauty appears, the beauty of love that goes all the way “to the end” and that, just because of this, reveals itself to be stronger than falsehood and violence.

Here comes little Clothesline... ::strongbad hums::

2005-04-23T12:52:00.000-07:00

"Theology's good, but I want to know who killed who!" - Dr. S.

All your base are belong to Ratz.

2005-04-20T19:18:00.000-07:00

In AD 2005, a new papacy was beginning...

Liberal Catholic: What happen?
Bishop: John Paul II pass away.
Priest: We get signal.
Liberal Catholic: What!
Priest: Look up at chimney.
Liberal Catholic: Habemus papem
Ratz: How are you gentlemen.
Ratz: All your base are belong to Benedict XVI.
Ratz: You are on the way to salvation.
Liberal Catholic: What you say!
Ratz: You have no chance to survive make your time
Ratz: Ha ha ha ha.
Priest: Hallelujah!
Liberal Catholic: Take off every 'Feminist Theologian'
Liberal Catholic: You know what you are doing.
Liberal Catholic: Move 'Feminist Theologian"
Liberal Catholic: For social justice.

*snark* I found this on a thread at Amy Welborn's. She finally closed it because of all the snarling that was going on, but there was some funny stuff there. Someone translated Maureen Dowd's remark "The cafeteria is officially closed" into Latin: Cucumella cafearia clausa est. Wouldn't that make a great Papal moto?

CVCVMELLA CAFEARIA CLAVSA EST

::cue Imperial March::

I'm sooooooooo giddy!!!!!!!!!!

Fiddleback Fever stuff...

2005-04-20T18:24:00.000-07:00

There's a lot of cool stuff at Fiddleback Fever: Sheila's account of the news of Pope Benedict hitting the campus, Christendom quotes ("If you're not afraid of dying in mortal sin, you're like a religious Evel Kenieval."), and a poem I wrote about leaving Christendom... before I came to Christendom. Enjoy.

Benedict XVI!!!!!

2005-04-19T16:58:00.000-07:00

Te Deeeeeeeum laudaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamus...

Procession time!

Now begin the days of Pope Benedict XVI. May they be blessed.