Pop Culture Education

Apple bottom jeans

Are You Proposing?

Myrrh and I decided that we could avoid awkward interactions in the future by asking men, innocently and confusedly, "Are you proposing?"

Here are some examples of how this could be used. In the first case, and the origin of the idea altogether, when a man asks for your hand and you're pretty sure he doesn't want to hold it but you can't think of any other reason that he would be asking for it (it ends up he wanted to put a bottle cap in it) and you offer it to be held. This awkward situation could have been pre-empted by the question, "Are you proposing?"

In another circumstance, a boy/old man named John with the cat and the hat said, "I guess you're over 21, since you're a teacher?" This really should have been answered with, "Are you proposing?"

How, you may ask, does this solve the awkwardness of the interaction? By putting it all on the boy/man. I guarantee that any boy/man will be so confused that he will forget any other awkwardness of the situation.

Myrrh: Additional benefit/risk: He says yes.

An Early Spring

Crocuses (or, as my sister would say, crocii) come first.

Then, "I wander'd lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils..."

The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;

They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,

And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes

Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me. (Sylvia Plath)

For You Departed

"The halcyon days. I write of them with unbelievable longing to have again what one cannot have again, so that my desire to relive what cannot be relived begins actually to war against my knowledge, final and ineluctable, that it cannot be done. ... The halcyon days. And that means not only the sweetest days of life, it means also the days that cannot be lived again, except in memory." Alan Paton

Rant: On Sickness, Old Age, Laundry, GChat, Insults (Or the Absence of Compliments, Really) and Men

I mostly like men. It's just that a rant doesn't feel complete without them in it.

On Wooing Women

One of the main reasons I blog is so that I can do feminist reads of things and not be teased for being a rabid liberal feminist. It is tiresome to make feminist comments (of any sort) in real life.

So, in Henry V, Harry's claim to the French throne is tenuous, due to a law prohibiting women (or descendants of women) from inheriting: "In terram Salicam mulieres ne succedant: 'No woman shall succeed in Salique land.'" Harry allows himself to be convinced by the Archbishop of Canterbury (who has questionable motivations, at best) that this law doesn't apply to him, and runs off to conquer France and the French princess.

Now the bilingual wooing scene is genius, but I'm not sure I approve. Harry is clearly masterful--he gets what he wants, he is a remarkable orator, he has a keen sense of justice and is possibly even right to turn his back on his old friends in his new role as king (although I'm not sure on this point). But he sweeps through France and the French princess with the same speed and sweet talking, and it all just seems a little fast.

The wooing scene, from the beginning in which Queen Isabel leaves to review the treaty with the men, asserting that "I will go with them: / Haply a woman's voice may do some good, / When articles too nicely urged be stood on," shows the mediating power of women. Moreover, we see when Harry begins to speak with Katherine, the princess, that although her English is quite basic, she has learned some English in an attempt to bridge the gap between them.

The rhetoric of Harry's wooing is remarkable. At his flattery, she quickly replies, "O bon Dieu! les langues des hommes sont pleines detromperies"--the tongues of men are full of deceits. At which Harry must change his tact and simply appeal to her pity and his inability to speak well (which just clearly isn't true--I don't know if he actually was plain, but Kenneth Branagh sure is, which makes it convincing--but if nothing else, Harry can speak well and we see it throughout the play, from the speeches to his men to his obvious expertise at wooing). Once he starts to get Katherine and know that he's gotten her, he insults women: "I will tell thee in French; which I am sure will hang upon my tongue like a new-married wife about her husband's neck, hardly to be shook off." If that is what he thinks women are like, why is he bothering with marriage? (Because women are something like land--worth conquering and ruling.)

One of the lines that Harry gives Katharine is that kings are above the law, that they are law and custom makers, in order to get her to kiss him. He says, "O Kate, nice customs curtsy to great kings. Dear Kate, you and I cannot be confined within the weak list of a country's fashion: we are the makers of manners, Kate; and the liberty that follows our places stops the mouth of all find-faults; as I will do yours, for upholding the nice fashion of your country in denying me a kiss." While in one sense it is clearly true that royalty and elites often disproportionately influence the formation of customs, it is not true that they ought to ignore the restraints of those customs.

Ode to a Cavalier

Mine was red, but you get the picture. We drove it, today, to a junk yard. As the man "forgot his checkbook," we are only hoping for a hundred dollars in the mail. Ah, well.

Let's see: the car was a graduation gift. My sister and I drove it jet lagged to Texas immediately upon our return from Europe the summer I got it. I nursed it through various maladies, such as a crusty catalytic converter, a new flywheel, replacing the freeze plugs (that included about a thousand trips to the auto parts place, trying to find ones of the correct size), to name really only a few of the things that went wrong with it.


On that car, I learned how to check oil, replace headlights, and replace fuses--the grand total of all my mad car skills (boys dig car skills). I never crashed it. That is the first car that holds that distinction.

But boy, I will miss it--listening to the radio way up loud by myself and feeling like a very independent woman/race car driver.

Reflection on Detachment Or Rhapsody on Plum Blossoms in Standard Running Script

One Art

by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

Richard Wilbur

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,

And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul

Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple

As false dawn.

Outside the open window

The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,

Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.

Now they are rising together in calm swells

Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear

With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

Now they are flying in place, conveying

The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving

And staying like white water; and now of a sudden

They swoon down into so rapt a quiet

That nobody seems to be there.

The soul shrinks

From all that is about to remember,

From the punctual rape of every blessed day,

And cries,"Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,

Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam

And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.''

Yet, as the sun acknowledges

With a warm look the world's hunks and colors,

The soul descends once more in bitter love

To accept the waking body, saying now

In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,

"Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;

Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;

Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,

And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating

Of dark habits, keeping their difficult balance.''

John Keats

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charact'ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And feel that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power

Of unreflecting love;—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

So Bishop's poem (and it comes first, for women must be attended to on the question of detachment as they best show us the nature of attachment) shows us the connection between attachment and detachment in a way that is similar to Eliot's point that attachment and detachment are both alike in important ways, while indifference is different and problematic. Detachment is passionate and oriented to reattachment to something.

Wilbur's poem is beautiful and profound. Love prevents us from an all-too-easy and improper "detachment"--an escape of the soul from the difficult messiness and beauty of life. The very nature of our attachment to the world because of love implies, too, a detachment--for it is a "bitter love" and a "difficult balance" and a reluctant descent.

Keats is the solution that I'm least comfortable with--a) his fear is related to him not having time to write (and while this is a sort of living, it is also a reflection on living, which ought to be less difficult to imagine giving up than life itself); b) it is through isolated thought (both of which are problematic, and being alone is, I think, impossible) that he detaches from his fear of death.

Baby, It's Cold Outside

Yesterday, as I was walking home from the metro, coughing, sniffling and crying in turn, my legs numb because I don't own any long underwear, I passed my favorite manikin on the side of the rode. The manikin belongs to a darling little vintage boutique with a newspaper clipping on the wall from the time that the Bush twins were there and one called out to the other, "Sister!" (My sisters now do this if we're in that store, or other stores, for that matter, together.) The manikin is cool--her arms are extended from her side as if she is signaling for men and traffic to stop and pay attention to her. The manikin was dressed in an adorable hot pink sundress, gathered at the waist and gauzy and summery. But this was ultimately a disconcerting sight on such a cold day.

Sometimes, for my lenten act of mercy, I teach young children who are talking before or after mass that talking in church is a bad idea. I do this by, first of all, glaring at them (they rarely notice), followed by coughing (again, ignored), and, finally, outright shushing them (they usually respond quite well). I wish I could do the same thing to their parents, and, for that matter, grandparents. Just another reason to long for white hair and old age and the earned right to boss perfect [rude] strangers around.

Baptist preaches on KJV

Settling is mostly a women’s game.

On Greeting Cards

Hannah Arendt and Heidegger talk about how if we don't express particular parts of ourselves as humans, we may lose the ability to express them at all. Arendt says this in regard to freedom. At a much more mundane level, I think greeting cards may emotionally handicap us. If we aren't able to express our emotions to those we love most, me may lose our capacity to do so. The best thing that greeting cards can possibly be is well-chosen. They rarely show or develop a deep level of self-understanding or the ability to express sentiments well. They make it all too easy not to learn to articulate your own feelings and express your own love and appreciation.

On Words and Images

The Pope spoke recently about the need to fast from words and images: "It seems to me that the time of Lent should be a time of fasting from words and images, because we need a little silence, a little space, without being constantly bombarded with images. We need to create spaces of silence [...] to open our hearts to the true image, to the true word."

This is clearly an invocation of the via negativa, as (who else?) Eliot writes in The Four Quartets:

"There are three conditions which often look alike

Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:

Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment

From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference

Which resembles the others as death resembles life,

Being between two lives—unflowering, between

The live and the dead nettle. This is the use of memory:

For liberation—not less of love but expanding

Of love beyond desire, and so liberation

From the future as well as the past. ...

... See, now they vanish,

The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,

To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern."

Later he writes, "You would have to put off / Sense and notion." This putting off of sense experience, this "midwinter spring"--a spring not like one we typically experience--is for the purpose of prayer and communion.

On the Virtue of Doubt

One of the dangers of learning is in being attached to one's own ideas or to one's own interpretation of the ideas of others. We gain freedom through truth, but we can be held back from truth by holding to closely to what is our own, particularly to the thoughts that are our own. Yves Simon in A General Theory of Authority is quite good on the role of obedience in releasing us from attachment, even attachment to our own ideas.

This is akin somehow to Mother Theresa's unknowing (which many interpret as a negative sort of doubt, but which is really only a greater form of belief--when you believe and act according to that belief, in the midst of your doubts, which arise because of your lack of sensual and sometimes even spiritual experience).

In the very remarkable A Secular Age, Charles Taylor writes, "Those who believe in the God of Abraham should normally be reminded of how little they know him, how partial is their grasp of him. They have a long way to go. (Of course, the fanatics among the forget this and revert to living in another bubble, enjoying a false confidence in their own hard-edged truths.)"

On the Death of a Language

Possibly the most severe example of the disintegration of a tradition is in the death of a language. What a fitting thing for an obituary to mourn. This is a loss we all must feel. Since form and content must reflect one another, at least to some degree, imagine the myths and stories that were lost--stories that could only be told in a that language with words with particular layers of meaning. Imagine the poems that we don't have anymore and the metaphors. As Donne wrote, "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee," so the death of a language impoverishes our own language (or the whole of which our language is part).

Li-Young Lee is an American poet, born in Indonesia to a Chinese pastor.

Hear him read his poem "The Train Station"; this recording is a bit eerie, but his reading matches the minimalism of his work, which is influenced by Chinese poetry.

The themes that he deals with are of great interest to me--questions of home and place and travel and unity of body and soul. He writes about the effort to remember your origins, which seems to me to be, at least in part, what the doctrine of recollection gets at, and also the question of founding, but at a personal rather than communal level.

He writes also, "I am never done answering to the dead," and shows how his answers to the dead (in this case to his father, who asks him if he's prayed) are not what the dead will always expect (he answers through poetry). This makes me wonder if all we get from the past are questions.

Tractor: A Unique Way to Attract Her

Excerpts from a wonderful article about a man and a woman who meet online over their mutual love for tractors, published in a North Carolina magazine called This Week (I must note that the whole thing is set in Pennsylvania):

"She wanted a man who could share the thrill of a good tractor-pull show, who could see the beauty in a shiny row of green and yellow tractors."

"On their first date, it was Sonya and Tom. And Pap. Sonya's granfather was a chaperone, sitting quietly in the back of her Jeep until they reached the Bonanza steakhouse, where the retired farmer chatted with Tom. About tractors, of course. ... Tom didn't mind Pap's presence. 'It's all about trust,' he says. 'Her mother didn't want her to go by herself and I understand that.'"

Since then, Pap has died, but they got engaged at his house, in order to put happy memories back in, and they will move into his old house after they marry.

Rural people even redeem online dating--what can be shady if your grandfather is with you at Bonanza? Okay, so there are some questionable aspects: they got cow cake toppers and will ride a tractor home from their wedding...

A Lament or On SuperPoke

Even more reprehensible than facebook itself are some of the facebook applications (in fact, I've never found one that I liked). Possibly the most attrocious that I've seen thus far (rivaled by the one in which you give people eggs and the eggs hatch and grown into random things like alligators or lollipops) is SuperPoke. While SuperPoke might be able to be used in a non-nauseating fashion, in one person's profile in particular, it isn't. He primarily SuperPokes and is SuperPoked by his girlfriend. This includes kissing, blowing kisses, hugging and cuddling and kissing some more. I just want to scream at him, "You aren't really kissing her!" That can't possibly be fulfilling in any way. It is public PDA without enjoying any of the benefits while still making the person next to you (next to you in the virtual sense, in this case) supremely uncomfor-ta-ble.

Open-Access Scholarship

Harvard is voting about whether or not to publish the work of its faculty for free on-line access. This would obviously significantly change publishing, making it more about the university at which you work rather than the journal you make it into. And perhaps this would mean the end of blind peer-reviewing (not that it could ever be blind, anyway)?

Does Erring Conscience Bind?

In Too Late the Phalarope the central conflict of the book is that the Lieutenant, a man among men, does not feel a repulsion for black people in the way that his apartheid culture demands he must. He sleeps with a black woman and this leads to the social downfall of his family. And yet, Paton shows us that it is right that he is not repulsed by black people, despite the "Christian South Africans" who cannot see this truth at all.

Huck Finn faces a similar conflict: he knows Jim as a person, but still feels as if he must turn him in for running away from slavery. Twain writes about Finn's internal conflict when he isn't able to turn Jim in:

They went off and I got aboard the raft, feeling bad and low, because I knowed very well I had done wrong, and I see it warn't no use for me to try to learn to do right; a body that don't get started right when he's little ain't got no show -- when the pinch comes there ain't nothing to back him up and keep him to his work, and so he gets beat. Then I thought a minute, and says to myself, hold on; s'pose you'd a done right and give Jim up, would you felt better than what you do now? No, says I, I'd feel bad -- I'd feel just the same way I do now. Well, then, says I, what's the use you learning to do right when it's troublesome to do right and ain't no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same? I was stuck. I couldn't answer that. So I reckoned I wouldn't bother no more about it, but after this always do whichever come handiest at the time.

The irony here is that Huck thinks that he is sinning. He feels that he is a confirmed sinner because of something that the readers know to be a right choice--helping Jim escape. Really, we see that his conscience is divided: he would feel bad if he turned Jim in, and he would feel bad if he didn't. Is he sinning, then? Bonaventure says that he is responsible to change his conscience. But how does one know how to do that? The best that I can think it is possible to do is to educate your conscience within your religious tradition (through seeking councel, reading, etc.). But what is one to do in the case of the Lieutenant, when one has the intimation that one's tradition itself is corrupt? What resources do we have through which to critique our tradition?

Three Sisters

The Sisters

Look how the same possibilities
unfold in their opposite demeanors,
as though one saw different ages
passing through two identical rooms.

Each thinks that she props up the other,
while resting wearily on her support;
and they can't make use of one another,
for they cause blood to rest on blood,

when as in the former times they softly touch
and try, along the tree-lined walks,
to feel themselves conducted and to lead;
ah, the ways they go are not the same.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Sisterhood is one of the most delightful things in all of life. It is also difficult, as Rilke shows us here: relationship requires sameness and difference and in sisters, the sameness and difference are both extreme. He uses the metaphor of different ages (this is incredibly disparate--different ages can barely even be compared with one another) passing through identical rooms. You can't get more the same than identical. This captures the immensely different personalities passing through very similar structures, persons bound by blood.


The second stanza points to the limits of family and tradition. Finally, while sisters think that they are supporting the other, blood can't hold up blood. This points the need for friendship and for other traditions to supplement your own. The last stanza captures the pain of change, particularly in families where changing can lead one to be perceived as a traitor.


When I was young, my parents pointed out the constellation called the three sisters in the sky (this, I've lately discovered was a conflation of the seven sisters with Orion's belt, three bright stars approximately evenly spaced). But it's a nice myth, and I think I'll keep on sharing it with other people.

Women and Work

So suddenly women are in the working world and Hollywood has to make sense of that.

This brings Sex and the City, which, through its very different characters, explores various ways of addressing what is a rather new problem--how to live as an unmarried working woman. I tell my father all the time thanks very much for looking out for me still, because, for much of the history of man, I would've run from my father's house to the arms of a husband. I think that Sex and the City is important for not holding back from asking these questions, but ultimately (obviously) falls short in suggesting that women (aided by birth control) can/should act just like men, rather than emphasizing the strengths that women bring to men--their ability to help men know and understand themselves, their ability to help connect men to the concrete, etc.

This season we have two new shows: Cashmere Mafia (from Darren Star, the producer of Sex and the City) and Lipstick Mafia (from Candace Bushnell, author of Sex and the City).

Cashmere Mafia uses four women once again; this time we have: a woman with one daughter and a lying husband, a woman with two (woah--large family!) children and a sort of stay-at-home-dad, a woman who was recently dis-engaged by her fiance for beating him in business, and a woman who is exploring her sexual orientation ("It is not about whether I like women or men; it's about whether I like this particular woman or man or not"--but even proponents of this view have some understanding of nature as you never hear her say: "It isn't about whether I like people or animals; it's about this particular dog.").

Lipstick Jungle offers only three women (scandal!): unmarried, married with children, and married to an old, boring professor (ah! professors are not boring!).

What is somewhat disappointing, but to be expected, from all of these shows is not that women work and have romantic relationships, but rather that their work is never described as something that they do because it is fulfilling for them, but rather it is something they do so that they can live a life of style, high fashion, fancy drinks and nice parties. This is, for them, the end of life. And their families are suffering. Which isn't to say that they're wrong to try to make a go of marriage and work, but rather that the goal of the work is not portrayed to be creation (although, sure, these women are all really good at what they do), but success--success measured in terms of money.

Sex and the City is better on this score--Carrie doesn't sell herself out to money, sex, or accomplishment in the way that some of her friends do. But, on the other hand, Charlotte is the lesson from the show that we can't re-enchant the world, but that we must educate our romanticism (and feminity?) to the demands of the modern world.

On Kissing.2

"She was in favor of kissing every single frog." Great line, that's all.

Wrestling with God

What sort of religion makes you fight God for men? If I had known this, I wouldn't have joined. I feel like God has a slight advantage, and while I'm always up for a competition, I prefer it when I have a chance of winning.

Forget vocation awareness activities until Myrrh and I have men.

Poetry over Prose (1)

A first attempt at responding to JBL's question about why we need poetry at all when we already have prose through which to communicate:

I'm pretty sure it has a lot to do with communication through images and symbols.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge offers insight into this question. According to Coleridge, three of the five parts of the soul are the Understanding, Imagination, and Reason. He has a very different understanding of these from how we understand them today. For Coleridge, the Understanding is concerned with sense experience. Reason, on the other hand, is both our perception and the reality that we perceive. Imagination is the thing that leads the faculty of our Understanding to participate in Reason (and Imagination is most remarkable for its unifying power). This most often happens through poetry and in the Scriptures. I'm not going to lie, the following bit is from a paper I wrote years ago (sorry, there are footnotes):


One Coleridge scholar writes about the difference between poetry and prose in Coleridge's thought: “Prose will be the medium of the understanding; analysis and generalization will be the modes of thought, and they will require intellectual assent from the reader. Imaginative, symbolic, paradoxical, and nonrational language will presumably be excluded [from prose], because its proper medium is poetry.”[1] As Coleridge’s career develops, he is increasingly convinced that “prose, considered as the language of distinctions, definitions, logic (in short, of the understanding), is ultimately futile.”[2] Poetry unifies particularly through its use of symbols.[3] The symbol is “the awakening source” of the power of the imagination, “its mediatory channel and its product, that which reveals the universal in the particular and which is often the means of raising human consciousness to the contemplation of spiritual truth.”[4] The symbol not only points to reality, but it is the “inward unity of the objective reality of the universal idea and the subjective apperception of that reality expressed in a particular form.”[5] Symbols, then, somehow participate in that objective reality that they also work to communicate to us. Poetry, through its use of symbols, brings together the subjective and objective through the participation of symbols (at least in a small degree) in the objective itself. It parallels that use of language by God in the creation of the world, when language brought order to chaos.[6] Here we see an apologia for the importance of literature and other art that develops the imagination, and particularly for poetry, since it unifies the Understanding and the Reason through symbol. The Logos, or Christ, is the greatest of all symbols, because he mediates between God and man.[7] Coleridge’s idea of the Logos is a key part of his thought, but he does not fully develop it (he planned to but left unwritten a book about this idea in particular). The Logos is both a principle and a Person, as identified in the book of John.[8] It is both the Word and words, “the source and living power of language.”[9] It is, in a sense, the Imagination as applied to God.





[1] David R. Sanderson, “Coleridge’s Political ‘Sermons’: Discursive Language and the Voice of God,” Modern Philology, 70.4 (May 1973), 322.
[2] Ibid., 324.
[3] Douglas Hedley, Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion: Aids to Reflection and the Mirror of the Spirit, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 132.
[4] Mary Anne Perkins, Coleridge’s Philosophy: The Logos as Unifying Principle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 48.
[5] Ibid., 49.
[6] Gene M. Bernstein, “Self-Creating Artifices: Coleridgean Imagination and Language,” Modern Philology, 76.3 (Feb. 1979), 246-47.
[7] Perkins, 52.
[8] Ibid., 22.
[9] Ibid., 26.

On the Individualism of Acknowledgments

A line something like, "Neither they nor any of the other people mentioned are accountable for the shortcomings of this book, which are my responsibility," is at the end of every acknowledgements section or in the introduction at the beginning of every academic book published these days.

I find this line tiresome for several reasons: First of all, it is obvious and uninteresting--of course other people are not responsible for your errors, and of course you are. Second, in a way, others are complicit in your own errors, for you cannot, for instance, be expected to overcome all of the errors of your time through perfect access to universal truth. No, the people who comprise your academic community form you in many important ways.

Here's an acknowledgement I like a bit more: "A special pleasure is it to say my thanks to my friend and colleague Professor R--- for his help in improving my English. His thorough analysis of sections of the manuscript, his reasoned advice with regard to grammar and style, his congenial understanding of the relations between philosophical subject matter and means of linguistic expression, have had a pervasive effect. I can only hope that the disciple will not disappoint the master too deeply." This is noteworthy not only for its recognition of the reliance of the student on the master and the necessary connection between the two, but also for its humility in knowing that we do fail; we do make errors (something academics often like to pretend doesn't happen in the profession). Rather than saying "if there are any errors," he acknowledges that there will be disappointments and hopes that they are not too great.

But my favorite acknowledgement of all time is from a friend of mine (and this comes after a whole list of people he thanks): "To my wife Claire, for reasons I shan't disclose. Finally, to paraphrase Willmoore: Let us have no foolishness about their not being responsible for this book and its contents. All, in their own way, must bear some part of the responsibility."

And After This Our Exile

This is the time of tension between dying and birth

The place of solitude where three dreams cross

Between blue rocks

But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away

Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

--From Eliot's "Ash-Wednesday"

Eliot's magnificent poem, "Ash-Wednesday," shows us that Ash Wednesday is about remembering that we are living between the yew trees (after our first death to sin and before our physical death and also between out birth and death) and that this means we must not hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing. Eliot's meditation in Ash-Wednesday is one of detachment.

A Less Lovely Library

Georgetown University has a lovely central building, Healy Hall, which was built in the Flemish Romanesque style:

Lauinger Library was built in the 60's as a sort of re-interpretation of Healy in the ominously named brutalist style:

It isn't a shame that a tree covers much of the front of the building. And the inside is just as bad as the outside.

Fraction Rite

Fraction Rite

In the depths of despair with dyed-green hair.

Backwashed bread floats in the fluid-filled womb.

Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.

"And that one who would toss her pretty mane

And say, 'It's just like coming home again.'"

Here is home, in my mouth, like mother's milk.

Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.

"Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth

Blown, / Lilac and brown hair; / Distraction"

Begging baby with wide-open mouth,

Pushing hair aside, tongue reached out for bread.

Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, grant us peace.

Eleanor K. Manning

Dove Descending

Eliot set to music, in particular, to the music of Stravinsky. Thanks to my tech-savy brother, yes, the same one who shot the potato gun.

On the Inherent Insult of Compliments

In The Ethics 1.12, Aristotle describes the difference between praising and blessing:

Having determined these points, let us examine with respect to Happiness, whether it belongs to the class of things praiseworthy or things precious; for to that of faculties it evidently does not. Now it is plain that everything which is a subject of praise is praised for being of a certain kind and bearing a certain relation to something else: for instance, the just, and the valiant, and generally the good man, and virtue itself, we praise because of the actions and the results: and the strong man, and the quick runner, and so forth, we praise for being of a certain nature and bearing a certain relation to something good and excellent (and this is illustrated by attempts to praise the gods; for they are presented in a ludicrous aspect by being referred to our standard, and this results from the fact, that all praise does, as we have said, imply reference to a standard). Now if it is to such objects that praise belongs, it is evident that what is applicable to the best objects is not praise, but something higher and better: which is plain matter of fact, for not only do we call the gods blessed and happy, but of men also we pronounce those blessed who most nearly resemble the gods. And in like manner in respect of goods; no man thinks of praising Happiness as he does the principle of justice, but calls it blessed, as being somewhat more godlike and more excellent. Eudoxus too is thought to have advanced a sound argument in support of the claim of pleasure to the highest prize: for the fact that, though it is one of the good things, it is not praised, he took for an indication of its superiority to those which are subjects of praise: a superiority he attributed also to a god and the Chief Good, on the ground that they form the standard to which everything besides is referred. For praise applies to virtue, because it makes men apt to do what is noble; but encomia to definite works of body or mind. However, it is perhaps more suitable to a regular treatise on encomia to pursue this topic with exactness: it is enough for our purpose that from what has been said it is evident that Happiness belongs to the class of things precious and final. And it seems to be so also because of its being a starting-point; which it is, in that with a view to it we all do everything else that is done; now the starting-point and cause of good things we assume to be something precious and divine.

He tells us here that praise involves reference to a standard that is applied by the one who is praising. It is somewhat silly for us, then, to praise the gods, as we do it by likening them to ourselves, which is degrading to them. Additionally, pleasure isn't praised, for its goodness is self-evident, and it, in fact, forms the standard that is applied to other things.

What is needed for the highest things? Not praise, but blessing (which doesn't involve the application of a standard chosen by the blessor to the person blessed).

On Beautiful Libraries

This is a somewhat overwhelming blog post.

French Second Empire

The Eisenhower Executive Office Building (just beside the White House) is an example of the French Second Empire style, which is my favorite.

Another (even more beautiful) example of French Second Empire is the City Hall in my own dearly beloved Philadelphia.

It might be the combination of granite and slate that appeals to me. Also, the fabulous Mansard roofs, which find a modern incarnation in, ironically, McDonald's:

Which Baby?

A 1938 romantic comedy with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, Bringing Up Baby is a delightful film. Hepburn plays a charmingly manipulative woman, Susan, who will do anything to get her man and does get him in the end (as, of course, is fitting). And the film is all about leopards (including her pet leopard, Baby), and so appropriate for this blog.

One of the most wonderful lines occurs when Grant (David) realizes that Susan is chasing the dangerous leopard instead of the tame leopard (and cares about her for the first time): "Poor darling Susan. She's in danger and she's helpless without me!" This is followed immediately by a shot of Susan dragging in the unwilling and very violent leopard on a leash. Aha! Susan's act of appearing to be absolutely needy in order to get David is shattered in this moment. And the great powers of a woman (in being strong, when needed, and in teaching men to be strong, when they're present) shine through.

Susan pre-empts him, and she assumes things, but she does it all correctly and endearingly: "Oh David, can you ever forgive me? You can and you still love me! Oh David!"

In the end, we see that the title is purposefully ambiguous--who is the baby being brought up?

On the Depression of Spring

The first lines of "The Waste Land" use the surprising irony of a portrayal of spring as negative:

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow ...

This reminds me strongly of the first lines of Walt Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom'd":

When lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d—and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

O ever-returning spring! trinity sure to me you bring;
Lilac blooming perennial, and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.

Not only do both poems overturn traditional conceptions of spring as a time for new life, replacing it with spring as a time for mourning, but both poems also allude to lost love and mention lilacs. I wonder if Eliot's poem isn't an application of the sentiments of Whitman's poem (which mourns, at least in part, the death of an individual, President Lincoln) to the whole of culture, the culture of England and all culture.