Nightmare

A) I have no idea how women have four children. None at all.

B) When I was babysitting four children tonight, I lost one. I was nearly in tears. So he's a tired three year old--I put him in bed and threatened that I would tell his parents if he got out. Then I went to read to the five year old. When I came back to check on him 10 minutes later, he was gone. So I searched the house--every corner--twice (even the basement, even the area where the water heater is). And even looked around a little outside. Then I called the mother (at this point I was starting to lose my cool), who calmly informed me that he tends to fall asleep in strange places. Sure enough, I found him behind a pile of laundry, under a chair in his parent's room. (Remember in all of this that I'm bad at finding things--I was always the last child to find the Easter basket on Easter morning--all of my younger siblings had always already found theirs.)

She asked me to come back next week, and I agreed, since I hadn't actually lost her child.

Still Points and Shared Sonnets

One of the beautiful parts of Gaudy Night (and there are many) is when Harriet finds that Lord Peter has discovered her half-written sonnet (which she couldn't manage to finish) and completes it:

"This was the unfinished sonnet--and of all the idiotic things to do, to leave half-finished sonnets mixed up with one's detective work for other people to see! A schoolgirl trick, enough to make anybody blush. ... But here it was: and in the interval it had taken to itself a sestet and stood, looking a little unbalanced, with her own sprawling hand above and Peter's deceptively neat script below, like a large top on a small spindle.

Here then at home, by no more storms distrest,
Folding laborious hands we sit, wings furled;
Here in close perfume lies the rose-leaf curled,
Here the sun stands and knows not east nor west,
Here no tide runs; we have come, last and best,
From the wide zone in dizzying circles hurled
To that still centre where the spinning world
Sleeps on its axis, to the heart of rest.

Lay on the whips, O Love, that we upright,
Poised on the perilous point, in no lax bed
May sleep, as tension at the verberant core
Of music sleeps; for, if thou spare to smite,
Staggering, we stoop, stooping, fall dumb and dead,
And, dying so, sleep our sweet sleep no more.

Having achieved this, the poet appeared to have lost countenance; for he had added the comment:

'A very conceited, metaphysical conclusion!'

So. So there was the turn she had vainly sought for the sestet! Her beautiful, big, peaceful humming-top turned to a whip-top, and sleeping, as it were, upon compulsion. (And, damn him! how dared he pick up her word 'sleep' and use it four times in as many lines, and each time in a different foot, as though juggling with the accent-shift were child's play? And drag out the last half-line with those great, heavy, drugged, drowsy monosyllabes, contradicting the sense so as to deny their own contradiction? It was not one of the world's great sestets, but it was considerably better than her own octave: which was monstrous of it.)"

This is to say nothing of the discussion of polyphonic music at the end, when Harriet and Lord Peter get engaged (get engaged sounds so vulgar--I'm sure, for instance, that Myrrh and Warren didn't "get engaged," but rather, "engaged themselves to one another" or something like that).

Also, Sayers (or should I say "Harriet and Peter"?) on the still point reminds me of Eliot:

"At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance."

I guess others wrote about this theme, as well (although the only one that comes to my mind is Yeats' "the centre cannot hold"), which would be an interesting study.

On Pigs

I am actually really scared about the swine flu. You know, I get randomly petrified by odd things. I remember the year at the Outer Banks that I was particularly scared of rip tides. My father had a t-shirt with the initials D.A.R.T. on the back, and decided that it stood for Dads Against Rip Tide. I think I should buy a bunch of food and then not leave the house until it is passed.

On Georgetown

Fr. Schall on covering the letters IHS in Gaston Hall when President Obama spoke there earlier this month:

"The 'lesson' of Obama in Gaston Hall is evidently that this president covers over at least all Christian signs. Why? He expects, of course, that Christians will not be offended by this little restriction. Just as, on the same principle, he expects Muslims, Jews, Presbyterians, Anglicans, atheists, Ravens fans, Masons, Planned Parenthooders, evangelicals, and any members of our society when he, carrying out the logic learned here, covers all their identifying signs?"

On Aging

I notice that my skin is getting old, and, as a result, I got less burned than I would have otherwise today. And so, poems (from the section on women's skin in the anthology I love):

"Cosmetics do no good:
no shadow, rouge, mascara, lipstick--
Nothing helps.
However artfully I comb my hair,
embellishing my throat & wrists with jewels,
it is no use"

(Steve Kowit)

and

"I've come back to the country where I was happy
changed. Passion puts no terrible strain on me now.
I wonder what will take the place of desire.
I could be the ghost of my own life returning
to the places I lived best. Walking here and there,
nodding when I see something I cared for deeply.
Now I'm in my house listening to the owls calling
and wondering if slowly I will take on flesh again."

(Linda Gregg)

Side note: googling "sunburn" leads to distressing results.

The Fashion of Political Theory

"Of course people who are metrosexual or homosexual or tatooed or dress like Jim Ceaser can be conservatives–and should be"

Oh Professor Ceasar, what a man. The rumor around Georgetown is that when he was asked why he uses a cane (he has gobs), he twirled it in the air and said, "Pure affectation!"

Additionally, he confessed to us in class one day that he wore black for eight years, from 1992-2000 (roughly the dates of Clinton's presidency), until students started mentioning it in class evaluations.

Best. Show. Ever.

Twitter

Today was the first day I played a version of HORSE called ARISTOTLE. Embarrassing, I know.

Oh, Pennsylvania! (Updated)

Goodness gracious, figures! I remember asking my father when I was a little girl why Specter was not a democrat. I also remember asking him how you decide what political party to be part of.

This is beautiful:

"When a politician switches parties, it’s customary for the party he’s abandoned to denounce him as an unprincipled hack, and the party he’s joined to praise him as a brave convert who’s genuinely seen the light. But I think it’s pretty clear that Specter is an unprincipled hack. If his best odds of keeping his Senate seat lay in joining the Communist party, he’d probably do that."

On Threats

Emily: "Professor Berry, are you a trekky? Do we need to tease you about this?!"

Professor Berry: "You need to watch it. Given your literary sensibilities, I think you'd really enjoy it. And if you don't, you'll never receive your ph.d."

PB will be the chair of my dissertation.

I Am the Coolest Person You Know.2 and 3

(Part 1, in case you missed it, was when I replaced a headlight [and I think a tail light, too] on my car.)

I can roll my own cigarettes, thanks to Percy. Granted, it is really hard to stick the filters in, and they go out every moment, but I think the point remains.

B) I can even drive a little, little bit of stick shift now, too! (Also thanks to Percy.)

Twitter

I am homesick for Stearns inexpressibly much. It would be bearable if she had a phone.

Hats!

From darling Ilana, with the note that they reminded her of me.

A Jonah Day.2

"Anne felt lonelier than ever as she walked home, going by way of the Birch Path and Willowmere. She had not walked that way for many moons. It was a darkly purple bloomy night. The air was heavy with blossom fragrance--almost too heavy. The cloyed senses recoiled from it as from an overfull cup. The birches of the path had grown from the fairy saplings of old to big trees. Everything had changed. Anne felt that she would be glad when the summer was over and she was away at work again. Perhaps life would not seem so empty then.

I've tried the world--it wears no more
The coloring of romance it wore,

sighed Anne--and was straightway much comforted by the romance in the idea of the world being denuded of romance!"

Let's turn friends into a health food.

A Secular Age

Charles Taylore sounds really heterodoxically Catholic here, but I'm not so sure he's wrong:

"[W]e can also see it in another light. Neither of us grasps the whole picture. None of us could ever grasp alone everything that is involved in our alienation from God and his action to bring us back. But there are a great many of us, scattered through history, who have had some powerful sense of some facet of this drama. Together we can live it more fully than any one of us could alone. Instead of reaching immediately for the weapons of polemic, we might better listen for a voice which we could never have assumed ourselves, whose tone might have been forever unknown to us if we hadn't strained to understand it. We will find that we have to extend this courtesy even to people who would never have extended it to us ... --in that respect, perhaps we have made some modest headway towards truth in the last couple of centuries, although we can certainly find precedents in the whole history of Christianity. Our faith is not the acme of Christianity, but nor is it a degenerate version; it should rather be open to a conversation that ranges over the whole of the last 20 centuries (and even in some ways before). This, of course, leaves us with an immense set of messy, hermeneutical issues: how the different approaches relate to each other; how they relate together to questions of over-arching truth. We will never be without these issues; the believe that they can be finally set aside by some secure instance of authority, whether the Bible, or the Pope, is a dangerous and damaging illusion."

[Percy, the quotation ends here.]

He goes on to show that this is an argument for the Communion of Saints.

THEN he moves to Hopkins and the constitutive power of language, which I love (I think he uses the word, "Adamic" at one point):

"A new poetic language can serve to find a way back to the God of Abraham. ... In this kind of case, the poetry has a double source ... On the one hand, the poetic images strive to articulate experience, almost one might say, to gain relief from the 'acute discomfort' of powerful but confused feeling, as Eliot put it; on the other, they strive to make sense of, to make once more experimentally real, the action of God which has already been captured in theological language honed by tradition. The ultimate insight captured in a poem is a fusion of the two, which transforms both; that is, the expreience is given a deeper meaning, and the work of God acquires a new kind of experiential reality."

...

"So there are three issues, or perhaps three ways to put the same issue, which are inherent in this understanding of language and poetry: (1) that our language has lost, and needs to have restored to it, its constitutive powers; (2) that the loss of this power means that we can indeed, deal instrumentally with the realities which surround us, but that their deeper meaning, the background in which they exist, the higher reality which finds expression in them, remain ignored and invisible; put in different terms, (3) it means that our language has lost the power to Name things in their embedding in this deeper/higher reality. And of course, (4) this incapacity of language is a crucial facet of an incapacity of being, that our lives are reduced, flattened. 'All is seared with trade; bleared, seared with toil.'"

[end of quote, P]

Goodness gracious, I wish that I'd written that! Gosh, to be old and taken seriously when talking about such things.

Tweet

I hate ironing.

Urg

I hate change.

Best Book Ever

This came in the mail for me today. Goodness gracious, what good memories. We all loved this book--all of my siblings and my mother. The mother in the story is perpetually exasperated, which is probably why my mother liked it.

And it includes all the ways that you have fun as kids--making things out of boxes, dressing up, putting lipstick all over your face (I got in trouble for this when I was very young), pretending to be on a boat, making masks, lots of construction paper, etc.

And then there's the delightful rhyme of the text, including the refrain that it's impossible to get out of your mind:

"Jillian, Jillian, Jillian Jiggs!
It looks like your room has been lived in by pigs!
Later. I promise. As soon as I'm though,
I'll clean up my room. I promise. I do."

This reminds me of playing so hard when I was little that all of the toys were off of their shelves in the toy room. Then evening came, and we had to clean up. Cleaning up was such a drag.

Happy Feast Day!

By the god of Friendship

At the very, very end of the Gorgias, Socrates turns to friendship and teaching:

"So listen to me and follow me to where I am, and when you've come here you'll be happy both during life and at its end, as the account indicates. ... Nothing terrible will happen to you if you really are an admirable and good man, one who practices excellence. And then, after we've practiced it together, then at last, if we think we should, we'll turn to politics, or then we'll deliberate about whatever subject we please, when we're better at deliberating than we are now. For it's a shameful thing for us, being in the condition we appear to be at present--when we never think the same about the same subjects, the most important ones at that--to sound off as though we're somebodies. That's how far behind in education we've fallen. So let's use the account that has now been disclosed to us as out guide, one that indicates to us that this way of life is the best, to practice justice and the rest of excellence both in life and in death. Let us follow it, then, and call on others to do so, too..."

I like this ending--it seems to me that it argues that practice precedes theory--we can't always talk well about the things that we don't know. In fact, Oakeshott would tell us that it is very dangerous to divorce theory from practice if we want our theory to have any practical implications. What this passage contributes is the idea of practicing together--practicing in community--in order to be able to converse together well.

Stearns: Language confusion.1

A darling old man at the bus stop greeted me so happily today, it broke my heart to tell him I don't speak Slovak (Neviem po slovensky...). He carried on talking just the same, only loudly and slowly. Oddly, I still didn't understand, so he started talking in German. (I was able to make out that when he was a kinder, he could spreken in English.)

When we were getting on the bus, we had this exchange:

Old man: points at his eyes, then at his wife, shakes head sadly.
Stearns: translation to self, "how sweet, he looks after his poor old wife."
Stearns (aloud and enthusiastically): Dobre, dobre! [Good, good!]
Old man: Strange look, shakes head

So I watch them a little bit longer and it turns out she's blind.

Georgetown Popped

I hadn't been in Georgetown for about four days, and when I returned everything was different. The trees had been flowering for a little while, but now they were also the light, fresh, wet, spring green, too. And you know how I feel about green.

The Halcyon House

I want this house. It is on sale--less than 20 million (it started out at 30 million). It is missing a tennis court/basketball hoop. I'm also not sure that it has a balcony. But, other than that, it's perfect.

And it's historic: it was built by the first secretary of the navy (a friend of George Washington), was later bought by a nephew of Mark Twain's, and is now owned by a DC sculptor.

Also, I love the name.

Williamsport Lady Flame Wins League Championship

Goodness gracious! (it's at the bottom of the page) The weirdest part is that I know only one name from the team (although it seems as if they're still all related, which makes sense). As Gypsy wrote (thanks for the card!), "I resign myself to be part of the proud group who renamed the team 'Flame.'" Although I do remember that fight, and I think that I was pushing for the name, "Aggression." In retrospect, Flame is a better name.

Sex and the City

"I'm uncomfortable about this ... why are we talking about money?" --Charlotte

"'Best' is like, 'not love.'" --Samantha

Zelary.2

Yes, it's true--seeing a movie again makes it look a whole new way, given all of your intervening experiences.

When I watched Zelary last time, certain things stuck out. This time, however, I was struck by how sad it is. How really, truly sad it is. I had evidently subconsciously turned it into a happy movie.

Zelary also does a really good job of capturing not only the wonderful, charming aspects of life in community, but also the dangerous, abusive, horrible aspects of it, too--the woman who leaves her husband for her father-in-law and has his child, and the town drunkard who beats his wife and child and tries to rape Hanulka.

The priest is an interesting character in the film--we never find out that much about him, but we get an idea of both his holiness and his secret pain or sin. We only get hints, though.

It is charming, too, the first time that Joza calls her Hanulka, the diminutive of her name. And it is sweet when he talks about getting sheep with her.

Bai Ling

From interviews with Bai Ling--this is just too much fun:

I once said to Jason [Statham], “You are my shiny diaper.” He laughed so hard, he couldn’t start. The directors said, “Where is this coming from?” I said, “I don’t know, it just came out of me.”

...

What do you call your spirit?
Eight Little Spirits in Miniskirts.

You have eight separate spirits. And they’re all in miniskirts?
Yes! They’re sitting on your hair, on your shoulder, on your nails. I’m like their peacemaker, because they don’t like each other. I have a panda, a chicken, a dolphin … I have a monkey … All in miniskirts.

What are these "Band-Aids of Truth" you wear on your legs?

I scratched myself here (pointing to her knee), so I went to this event and I put a Band-Aid on. It was so ugly, so I cut Brad Pitt's head here and the other side was Quentin Tarantino.

On Facebook

"It's given me a tool for exceptionally mindless, voyeuristic, puerile procrastination; crowd-sourced pesky problems like finding a new accountant; stoked my narcissism; warmed my heart with nostalgia; and created a euphoric, irrational, irresistible belief in the good in men's hearts among the most skeptical people I know--people who should know better." That is Vanessa Grigoriadis, in New York magazine, about Facebook, in another one of her fine explorations of the illusions of Internet life. Her animadversions about the Facebook ideal of the self begin with an account of the recent outrage provoked by the company's intention to use its members' content commercially. Did these innocents really expect discretion from the most formidable engine of indiscretion ever devised? Facebook is essentially a cheerful instrument of surveillance. It consists in two hundred million publicity campaigns. "I thought of my friends who had died of exposure," Nick Cave sings, "and I remembered other ones who had died from the lack of it." So it is heartening, I suppose, that some people are discovering the alienating consequences of early or excessive revelation--the dehumanization that results from "oversharing." What does it mean to know so much about someone whom you do not know at all? The problem is this. Intimacy cannot be achieved except by time. Knowledge of another individual must be gradual, or it is not knowledge at all--it is only information, which is what remains when you subtract time from knowledge. A person cannot be grasped by information. But the Internet, which reduces everything it contains to the status of information, will not tolerate any another pace. It believes above all in acceleration. And so it accelerates the experience of human encounter beyond the powers of the heart, into an impatient universe of recreational articulateness in which surfaces are advertised and trivialities are aggregated, and self-display precedes acquaintance, and strangers are "friends." It is a new kind of loneliness, defined paradoxically by the surfeit of possibility. In sum, it is a glass house, raised upon the denial that opacity is an element of dignity.

From The New Republic

Stearns: Request

I am supposed to begin a book discussion group here in Slovakia. I haven’t the least clue of what book to read, and I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts on this. Criteria: Must be 1) a novel 2) of interest to a group of young Catholics, 3) not too long or too complicated, 4) by an English or American author, 5) with maybe some name recognition. One of my ideas is The End of the Affair by Graham Greene. Please comment if you have any ideas! Please!

Stearns: Eastering in Slovakia

(After finding Hopkins’s “Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us,” I think easter should be a verb as a rule and a noun as an exception.)

The vigil is three hours and there are three separate occasions where we all light our brought-from-home candles. The last is for a near-midnight procession through the town, led by a brass band followed by a priest under a canopy carrying the monstrance and another carrying the just-kissed crucifix, lipstick wiped away. In the town square, we knelt and the traffic waited and felt left out, I presume.

I sang from the hymnals exuberantly in Slovak, and I’m pretty sure I meant it all, though

without knowing a bit what I said (except God=Boh). (It’s easier than it seems it should be, to mean without comprehending.) Anyhow, my pronunciation is much improved.

The Easter Monday tradition is for boys to throw water and whip with willow branches the girls. “To freshen them and keep them flexible and young.” The girls, oddly (to my American thinking), reward them with eggs, a ribbon from their hair, chocolate, and eventually alcohol.

On this Monday, I biked with a friend to a village outside Bratislava (where they have a distinctive pattern of painting that adorns their china, church, and some buildings—the picture is a sample). We were pushing our bikes when we ran into a group of boys (in their twenties) who decided to bestow their generous attentions upon us. We escaped on our bikes amid a flurry of whips.

We came across Slovaks in their traditional dress, who were very pleased to teach me all about their heritage. The mayor was there and was excited to hear that I was from Pennsylvania. (“I have a cousin in Philadelphia! Where are you from?” I’m sorry Cogan Station, but I always say “Just outside of Philadelphia.” It makes everyone so much happier to be able to recognize a place—you can see the pleasure on their faces. And it’s basically true, at least relative to where I am right now.)

Twitter

First day of summer; I love tulips!

Twitter

Iceberg lettuce is my favorite comfort food.

The Last Days of Disco

Finally! I've been waiting and waiting to see this (it is on Hulu, so you, too, should watch it).

What fun that characters from Metropolitan pop up in a couple of random scenes.

Finally there is a girl who is annoying enough to match the Chris Eigeman "Des." This is a relief. Also, Wilson from House is in this film--what a handsome man! and again charmingly playing a rather weak man.

I think that my favorite part was the discussion of Lady and the Tramp, which captures something so true about conversation--at the same time that you are talking about one thing, you can also be talking about something else (in this case, two men are making apologies for why they should be with Alice [Lady]).

I am feeling left out because I don't twitter.


(That was short, like a twitter.)

Central Market; Lancaster, PA (Okay, So Just Lancaster County in General)

Lancaster's Central Market is one of my favorite places, along with my grandparents' houses, my house, and a couple of other places. Since I was very young, when we visited my Lancaster grandparents, we would walk to market. Originally, my father liked it for the potential of running into the people that he might now, and I liked it because there were so many things to see that I'd never seen before (of course, that is perpetually true). Now, I think we like it because all the stands are always in the place that they're supposed to be (with little changes each time, of course)--the same Amish lady is still selling quilts and the same little old Greek woman is selling baklava. There will always be wasabi peas and loose leaf tea.





























































It was my dream as a little girl to walk around market with flowers in my arms. It seems like a funny dream now--but I think it was more the romance of owning a home in which you would keep fresh flowers--the idea that, casually, as if nothing was special, you would have arms full of flowers, was appealing.





















I know, I know, I grumble at the Industrial Revolution--I'm not supposed to think that this heartless, mass producing meat slicer is beautiful. And yet, I can't help it. Perhaps it comes from the period in which we were not allowed lunch meat, because the simple process of slicing it made it much more expensive than other meat--and, oh, how good some very thinly sliced turkey breast is!


What is market without trying something new? Rugby, who will be summering in China, introduced us to some sort of Chinese orange in which you eat the skin and even the seed. Of course he said this with a smile on his face, so, to this moment, I'm not entirely sure that he was telling us the truth.

But, in Lancaster County more generally, the wind veins are nice:

My Slovaks (and Stearns!)

An Argument Against Political Theory

Whigwham:

In the Ethics, Aristotle distinguishes between the contemplative (or scientific) reason and the calculative (or deliberative) reason. The former is concerned with necessary, eternal, and invariable truths, the latter with contingent and variable truths. He then identifies the 5 primary intellectual virtues and situates them in their proper places within this division of reason. He discusses practical wisdom (prudence) which, of course, is situated in the calculative/deliberative reason, because it concerns actions towards human goods which are variable and contingent. He then discusses the relationship between practical wisdom and political science. He says that they are the same "state of mind" but their essence is not the same--because they are concerned with different ends. Practical wisdom with the good of an individual man and political science (or political wisdom, as Aristotle puts it) with the good of the city. But because it is concerned with activity towards goods, political science must be a virtue associated with the calculative/deliberative reason.

So the argument against "political theory" is that it is an empty set. For to "theorize" is to belong to contemplative/scientific reason--to think in terms of necessary truths and their conclusions. But this is not the kind of knowledge that pertains to things political. First, things political necessarily entail action. Yet the contemplative/scientific reason does not pertain to action. Also, things political pertain to contingent human goods. Again, this is not the purview of contemplative/scientific reason. So the notion that one can come up with some political "theory" is contrary to the entire nature, domain, and ends of politics.

But, we all know that good political theory is not an attempt to come up with some grand theory of everything political. In reality, when done well, it looks a lot like Aristotle's political wisdom. Thus, I think the problem is just with the nomenclature. Why the insistence on "theory"?

Stearns: Hopkins's 'Easter Communion'

Pure fasted faces draw unto this feast:
God comes all sweetness to your Lenten lips.
You striped in secret with breath-taking whips,
Those crooked rough-scored chequers may be pieced
To crosses meant for Jesu's; you whom the East
With draught of thin and pursuant cold so nips
Breathe Easter now; you serged fellowships,
You vigil-keepers with low flames decreased,

God shall o'er-brim the measures you have spent
With oil of gladness, for sackcloth and frieze
And the ever-fretting shirt of punishment
Give myrrhy-threaded golden folds of ease.
Your scarce-sheathed bones are weary of being bent:
Lo, God shall strengthen all the feeble knees

On Marilynne Robinson, The Woman

Goodness gracious, Obama reads Marilynne Robinson, too! Amazing.

Robinson is such a lady--the way that she speaks, slowly and carefully and softly, the way that she dresses--a scarf that matches her gray and white hair, her obvious deep contentment with herself--the same contentment that is present in her characters. She says of this quality in her characters, "If they cherish their inwardness, they cherish a great deal more besides," discussing solitude as pleasure. She also has a strong maternal side--she said that the things that comfort another person are some of the most beautiful things, that these things are sacramental. And here she mentioned caring for a sick child and preparing food.

She talked at Georgetown about Gilead and the theme of blessing, which she was drawn to from the benediction at the end of church services. This blessing is connected to passing on your heritage--she writes about the vulnerability and anxiety of passing on a tradition to one's children.

She also gave an unusual answer to the question of the connection between home and education: She said that there is a gain that comes from being unplaced, and that it is not a helpful nostalgia for us to have to wish that we were less free.

Robinson also somewhat paradoxically claimed that she loves good people and she writes about characters that she loves. On the other hand, she notes that Jack Boughton is clearly not a good person, and yet that she loves him. She said that writing about him was a sort of test--"If people love Jack Boughton, God loves Jack Boughton." I approve.