MUSIC FOR MECHANICS: So every now and then I try to make people read Love and Rockets comics.

This is that time again. I've only got two entries here, but if others want to put their two cents in, I'll print 'em. I want to hook the world.

If you like Flannery O'Connor, you should try "Flies on the Ceiling: The True Story of Isabel in Mexico," in Love and Rockets vol. 9: Flies on the Ceiling. Every time her letters talk about the Devil, I picture the Devil in this amazing story--genuinely, one of the most frightening things I've ever read.

If you like the Missy Elliot song "Back in the Day," you should try the title story in vol. 7: The Death of Speedy. If even that doesn't do you for, you should still pick up vol. 11: Wigwam Bam. If you've spent years looking for the same day-glo noir you got from the best '80s music--it was hiding in these comics.

ONE OF MY LEAST FAVORITE PHRASES:

"He [she/they] brings it on himself, you know...."

Use each man after his desert, and who shall 'scape whipping?

KITCHEN ADVENTURES: WITH HONEY AND WITH VINEGAR. I'm not really sure why this fit came on me; but I had extra honey lying around, with many other leftoverish things and staples, and I figured I might try combining some of them. We have one success and one failure to report.

Spicy honey vinaigrette: I don't really know what a vinaigrette is, but my impression is that this would count. These quantities were for a side dish for one person. All quantities are even more approximate than they appear, and you should change them radically to accommodate your tastes.

Chop two cloves garlic; saute with a small amount of honey (I don't think it could have been more than a teaspoon?), a splash of balsamic vinegar, some cayenne, dashes of five-spice powder and curry powder, a small splash of olive oil, and the juice from half a lemon. Just saute it, stirring, until the garlic is well-cooked and fragrant, but not more than a tiny bit browned.

I ate this with 6 oz. well-cooked spinach. That was fine, but not the way to make the vinaigrette shine. The dark, vegetable taste of the spinach kind of got lost under the bright, sweet tanginess of the vinaigrette; and there was nothing to cut the heat from the cayenne. Homemade, buttered croutons would have been a perfect addition. But I think this would work very well as a salad dressing, especially for a salad with good, conventional tastes--not like my Crazy Salad. You get some cherry tomatoes, crumbled feta cheese, croutons, mixed lettuces and all that sort of thing, and I think this would be terrific. ...It might also look prettier if you substituted crushed red pepper for the cayenne. Those red flakes always look lovely in salad dressing. I think you'd need to use more then, to raise the heat level.

How did it taste? Well, I really liked that all of the flavors came out, and yet blended also. If I had to tweeze them apart, I think the flavors hit you like this: HOT balsamic vinegar and honey; garlic and spices, with lemon lilting in there at the end; spices and honey. So it finishes with a kind of exotic, spicy sweetness. People who like bottled hot sauces might like it. I'd expect you could use it as a marinade for chicken, since you can use anything as a marinade for chicken; and maybe also for pork, since people tend to pair pig and honey....

Honey-rosemary tomato sauce: Yeah, not so much. I saute'd chopped plum tomato, chopped sweet onion, chopped garlic, cayenne, five-spice powder, cumin, curry powder, dried rosemary (it was on sale--"don't question me!"), and honey, for maybe ten minutes or a bit more, stirring occasionally (basically, got it bubbling hot and then lowered the heat to simmer for the rest of the pasta's cooking time); and poured that over pasta, with one slice of ripped-up muenster cheese.

Too sweet. The later addition of grated Parmesan cheese helped a bit; but really, this was just too much sweetness, and looking at the ingredients list I don't know why I didn't realize that. The rosemary got completely hidden by the other flavors. This is edible, but it won't answer the Chickpea Eater's profound question, "Why do we say, 'It doesn't matter,' but not, 'It doesn't spirit'?"

His blogwatch she had tamed...

Family Scholars: How many advocates of gay marriage actually buy the Jonathan Rauch "conservative case"? Yeah, about how many you thought.

Also, a terrible story from New Orleans:

...Teenagers in the city are living alone or with older siblings or relatives, separated by hundreds of miles from their displaced parents. Dozens of McDonogh students fend largely for themselves, school officials say. …

The principal, Donald Jackson, estimated that up to a fifth of the 775 students live without parents.

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Hit & Run: Cliff's Notes to series on SF homelessness. Interesting.

And: Wily drunks circumvent cheap-booze ban, use what they learned in Econ 101:

...Outside the Dutch Shisler Sobering Center, which provides social services as well as a place for people drunk on the streets to dry out, a man who'd give only his street name -- Caveman -- said he'd been sober a month and a half. But, he said, "People are going to realize it's cheaper to get whiskey at the state-run (liquor) store. People are going to be drinking harder, and they're going to be getting drunker. It's easier, too, because you can just put it in your soda can."

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The Economist has launched two new blogs--one on economics, which I expect will become a must-read (although it isn't yet), and one on US politics of which I'm more skeptical. The few times I've dipped into Economist US-politics coverage it's tended toward a patronizing Toryish "LOL Americans" standpoint--whereas I want a hard-hitting "LOL Americans" standpoint that actually understands Americans!--to the extent that anyone does, I mean. Is that so much to ask? (Memo to the Economist: It helps to view God as something other than a bizarre political aberration akin to the electoral college.) ...Anyway, both links via Jane Galt, who will also be blogging at the econ one; see above re must-read.

And a neat article on the Latin Mass, from the perspective of a Jew describing the effect of Hebrew in Jewish liturgy. (If liturgy is the word I want. You know what I mean.) Via Dappled Things.

'Tis women make us love,
'Tis love that makes us sad.
'Tis sadness makes us drink--
And drinking makes us mad!
--trad.

Oh, I really do love this "Art of the Bawdy Song" CD from the Baltimore Consort. It's also interesting (though it makes perfect sense) that the songs whose innuendo is subtler or storyline gentler are given to women to sing. I mean, it's obvious why a woman sings "My Thing Is My Own" (and I adore the joyful, independent version on this album--buy it for your freshman daughters! Between "Some courtiers do promise much more than they do" and "As young as I was, I understood trap" they will learn some lessons they will very much need...), but the poignant "Cold and Raw" actually has a male narrator, so it's strange to hear this beautiful version sung by a woman. Anyway, highly recommended, especially if you like transitions from subtle bawdy humor to fart jokes and "My man John had a thing that was long...."

EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE: Everything that follows in this post is from Flannery O'Connor's letters (except where obviously indicated). In chronological order, and lightly edited to clarify something w/r/t Other People's Churches.

Furthermore, almost any spiritual writer ought to wear thin for you. It's like reading criticism of poetry all the time and not reading the poetry.

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The Communion of Saints has something to do with the fact that the burdens we bear because of someone else, we can also bear for someone else.

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What [Graham Greene] does, I think, is try to make religion respectable to the modern unbeliever by making it seedy. He succeeds so well in making it seedy that then he has to save it by miracle.

[Eve: Oh, I don't think this is really right--but I think it's one of those criticisms that, even when wrong because importantly incomplete, signal something real.]
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Crisis means something different of course for the Catholic than for the Protestant. For them it is the dissolution of their churches; for us it is losing the world.

[Eve: I don't pretend to have views about Protestants (other than not being one), because I don't get it. I didn't grow up among Protestants, I don't know any intensely (although I admire many), I can't write Protestant characters. I'm not proud of this--and it isn't a moral claim, as there are many terrible things I understand and many good ones I don't--but the opacity is there and I haven't gotten past it thus far. So this is a quote I find deeply suggestive, but, you know, I don't really do the Cath-v-Prot questions very well, because I don't get why you'd want to be something else when the Church is right there. ...And actually I think this reaction might be what O'Connor is talking about. Eh, at least I'm an object lesson.]
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[to a non-Catholic:] You speak of the Eucharist as if it were not important, as if it could wait until you are better able to practice the two great commandments. Christ gave us the sacraments in order than we might better keep the two great commandments. ...The center of this is the Eucharist.

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What people don't realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. ...If you feel you can't believe, you must at least do this: keep an open mind. Keep it open toward faith, keep wanting it, keep asking for it, and leave the rest to God.

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Penance rightly considered is not acts performed in order to attract God's attention or get credit for oneself. It is something natural that follows sorrow. If I were you, I'd forget about penance until I felt called to perform it. Don't anticipate too much. I have the feeling that you irritate your soul with a lot of things that it isn't time to irritate it with.

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The review is by a lady in the Concord P.L. She also says Tarwater is the latest edition to my "band of poor God-driven Southern whites." I am getting the connection between the God-driven and the underprivileged--God-drivenness being a form of Southern degeneracy....

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If Greene created an old lady, she would be sour through and through and if you dropped her, she would break, but if you dropped my old lady, she'd bounce back at you, screaming "Jesus loves me!"

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One of the good things about Protestantism is that it always contains the seeds of its own reversal. It is open at both ends--at one end to Catholicism, at the other to unbelief.

[Eve: See above re my slack-jawed bewilderment w/r/t all things Prot.]
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You don't join the Catholic Church. You become a Catholic.

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The writer whose point of view is Catholic in the widest sense of the term reads nature in the same way the medieval commentators read Scripture. They found three levels of meaning in the literal level of the sacred text--the allegorical, in which one thing stands for another; the moral, which has to do with what should be done; and the anagogical, which has to do with the Divine life and our participation in it, the level of grace.

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I hate to deliver opinions. On most things I don't deserve an opinion and on a lot of things I simply don't have an opinion.

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I very much like the idea that [Elizabeth Sewell] gets across that the poet deals exactly with the things that don't work out, that he's sort of a shock absorber, that he takes the first blows and mutes them through the imagination and makes things bearable.

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I'm glad you've figured out free will or whatever. It's great to be able to figure it out but dangerous to put too much faith in your figuring.

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Love and understanding are one and the same only in God. Who do you think you understand? If anybody, you delude yourself.

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I make do very nicely with guest rooms. In fact, I collect them. The one at Hollins was a fully equipped apartment, even down to the electric dishwasher. The larder was stocked with Mt. Etna Ginger Ale and hushpuppy mix. Did they read my stuff and decide this is what I would eat?

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I came back from my trip with enough money to order me another pair of swans. They are on their way from Miami and Mr. Hood, the incumbent swan, little suspects that he is going to have to share his feed dish. He eats out of a vase, as a matter of fact, and has a private dining room. Since his wife died, he has been in love with the bird bath. Typical Southern sense of reality.

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I'm rather glad the single folks, or left-overs as you call us, haven't been discovered by the Church. Think of the awful oratory that would flow over us....

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I wouldn't spend much time worrying about dryness. It's hard to steer a path between indifference and presumption and [there's] a kind of constant spiritual temperature-taking that don't do any good or tell you anything either.

DIVINE APHASIA: I've just watched Waiting for Godot and also Beckett's Not I. I don't have thoughts so much as reactions. So, a few reactions [edited b/c I wasn't sure I agreed with myself in all particulars]:

1. Godot is really, really funny. I laughed my way through--not contented laughter, but the kind that's startled out of you.

2. I almost think you could write a catechism based on Godot's absences. Rebuild Christian faith off of what Estragon and Vladimir expect. What is an outrage to them, rather than simply "the way things are"? From that, I think maybe you could trace a shadow of the Gospel. I would look at time vs. eternity, power/weakness/cruelty/poverty/class, and maybe guilt. Guilt is usually the distorted shadow of sin: You can't accurately trace sin from its distorted shadow, at all, but you can maybe intuit that there is a real thing casting this real shadow.

You can get these versions by Netflix'ing whatever comes up when you search for "Beckett on Film."

The two worst sins of bad taste in fiction are pornography and sentimentality.
--letters of Flannery O'Connor

It's close to blogwatch,
And something evil's lurking in the dark...

Amy Welborn: Reader asks: "I'm putting together my own card and 'care package,' and I am wondering if there are any suggestions for a Catholic book that might be good for a man in his situation, a lapsed Catholic who has maybe two or three months to live (barring a miracle--my friend did just go to Lourdes and prayed for him there!)."

First Things: Abortion and the difference between development and manufacture. Am linking because of the really interesting analogy between human development and the development of a photograph; I don't quite know what this does for people who aren't already pro-life, but either way, it should be worth your time.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN. So over the weekend I saw a really sweet, well-meaning advertisement for a Catholic church's "Holy Ween," where kids would dress as saints. And just... I... no. There is nothing wrong with dressing as a daggone witch, or a leopard or a ballerina. More importantly: I wondered what would happen if some kid became sick from an especially realistic St. Lucy with her eyes on a platter; a friend added, "Yeah. Just dress as St. Sebastian."

Hee, hee. You tell me how that works out for you!

Anyway, me on Magritte as a horror artist; my review of Carnival of Souls. And you guys should all see I Walked with a Zombie. Can we have more zombie movies about actual freakin' zombies, please?

SO, I'M UNDER THE WEATHER. I am, in fact, investigating the weather from the perspective of the snake. So I have stuff to say, but be forewarned, its coherence will be brought to you by a grant from the John D. and Catharine T. Sudafed Foundation. In the carousel of my head, right now all the horses are camels.

Because of the spitting.

...Yeah.

EDITED to change "seeking" to "socking," because apparently Maclin Horton can read and I can't!

I don't want to be any angel but my relations with them have improved over a period of time. They weren't always even speakable. I went to the Sisters to school for the first 6 years or so... at their hands I developed something the Freudians have not named--anti-angel aggression, call it. From 8 to 12 years it was my habit to seclude myself in a locked room every so ooften and with a fierce (and evil) face, whirl around in a circle with my fists knotted, socking the angel. This was the guardian angel with which the Sisters assured us we were all equipped. He never left you. My dislike of him was poisonous. I'm sure I even kicked at him and landed on the floor. You couldn't hurt an angel but I would have been happy to know I had dirtied his feathers--I conceived of him in feathers. Anyway, the Lord removed this fixation from me by His Merciful Kindness and I have not been troubled by it since. In fact I forgot that angels existed until a couple of years ago the Catholic Worker sent me a card on which was printed a prayer to St. Raphael. It was some time before it dawned on me Raphael was an archangel, the guide of Tobias. ...The prayer asks St. Raphael to guide us to the province of joy so that we may not be ignorant of the concerns of our true country. All this led me to find out eventually what angels were, or anyway what they were not. And what they are not is a big comfort to me.
--letters of Flannery O'Connor

"You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you have lost something."
--George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara

See--even Shaw gets stuff right now and again! Via About Last Night.

THE MEMORY PROJECT: "I founded the Memory Project in October, 2004, following the advice of a man in Guatemala. Having grown up in an orphanage, this young man did not have any pictures from his earliest years or any parents to share
memories of his youth. Consequently, he felt that much of his childhood had been forgotten, and he shared this feeling with a group of university students working at the orphanage. As one of the students, I was very moved by his story, and I founded the Memory Project as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization after returning home." (more--via E-Pression)

In any case I can't climb down off the high powered defense reflex whateveritis. The fleas come with the dog as Mr. McG. ...says. If you were Pius XII, my communications would still sound as if they came from a besieged defender of the faith. I know well enough that it is not a defense of the faith, which don't need it, but a defense of myself who does. The Church becomes a part of your ego and gets messed in with your own impurity. It's a situation I can't handle myself so I wait for purgatory to do it for me.
--letters of Flannery O'Connor

I CAN'T HELP IT. I did like "Dangerous Liaisons," but it didn't leave me as helpless to the power of its AWESOME as "Cruel Intentions." John Malkovich is a better actor than anyone in "CI" (though Ryan Philippe was fun--yeah, I said it), and the half-updated half-outdated dialogue didn't really work, and I'm two hundred percent over closing scenes where bitchy women get humiliated--and even so, all I can say is that this movie was ace.

...I can't tell if Catherine was supposed to be sympathetic or if I'm just completely wrong in the head.

I will never have the experience of the convert, or of the one who fails to be converted, or even in all probability of the formidable sinner; but your effort not to be seduced by the Church moves me greatly.
--letters of Flannery O'Connor

KITCHEN ADVENTURE: COME WIS ME TO ZE CASBAH. WE SHALL MAKE BOOTIFUL OMELETTES TOGEZZER. So okay, my first attempt at omeletteness kind of broke into parts. But I think that was because I was trying to transfer it into a too-small dish. Anyway, I used a recipe from The Foster's Market Cookbook and it worked really well. Your simplified version here:

1. Beat some eggs (they say three large, I used four smallish) with salt and pepper. I'm not totally sure what "beating" eggs entails (dude, be happy I can walk upright, okay?), but I whisked vigorously with a fork until the eggs were all mixed-up like the files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler, and that seemed to work okay.

[EDITED: Frankweiler, obviously. Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, and her, Elizabeth are all angry with me now.]

2. Put a big smacker of butter in the pan and heat it up and swirl it around until you've got butter everywhere in the pan. Mmmm mmm. Pour the eggs into the pan and, I guess, turn the heat down to medium, although I think I didn't do that for some reason.

3. This is where it gets interesting: "Let the eggs sit for a few seconds to begin cooking, then push the outer edges of the eggs toward the center of the pan with a spatula. As they cook, continue pushing the edges toward the center, allowing uncooked egg to flow to the outer edges of the pan."

4. "When the eggs are still moist but no longer runny, place the desired filling on one side of the omelet." The cookbook suggests all kinds of nifty-sounding fillings, which I won't reproduce here (buy the book! or read it in the store! just don't sue me!), but I used chopped tomato, onion, mushroom, and munster cheese, because that was what I had on hand.

5. "Fold the omelet over the filling with a spatula." I did a little cookity-cookity here, even though they don't say you have to, just in case. Anyway, voila! Decant onto plate and serve. "Garnish as desired."

In short, this was really neat-o keen, fancier than scrambled eggs, and easier than I'd expected. The eggs brown a little bit, and hold together better than scrambled eggs would. (I'm assuming that's because you use no milk and let the eggs sit longer.) Yum yum.

SEASONS IN THE SUN: If you had to name two women/girls, or images of women--whether characters or archetypes--who represented, to you, particular seasons of the year, who would you name?

like this: spring: Artemis (mostly because of her virginity, though a friend pointed out that as the goddess of the hunt she'd also be associated with autumn and the hunter's moon), Alice

summer: Maria Lactans, Andromakhe (or, in a completely different vein, Jean Grey/Phoenix--really, don't feel like these images need to be "high culture" or anything)

fall: Miss Havisham, Mary from The Secret Garden

winter: Narnia's White Witch, Medea

(obviously, these are very fuzzy distinctions, and which season you associate with which lady doesn't hugely matter to me.)

THANKS....

I watched my blog in Newport Pagnell....

(I think I've done that one before.)

Amy Welborn: I'm not done yet with this post, and don't expect I'll even make a sortie on the comments; but I'll be thinking about it for a while....

...The question that has bugged me for ages is different from that I hear asked by others. Others try to rebuild, to recreate that old sense of Catholic culture--which is admirable, but is it possible? No, what I wonder about is how do we reconstruct Catholic life in the catacombs? By that I don't mean the extremes of persecution, but as Christians living in a culture that is really inimical to the Gospel, at every point, to the celebration of materialism, consumerism, economic success, personal appearance, to the rank hostility to life and the commoditization of sex. Christianity was born and flourished in the Roman Empire, in conditions hostile to it. There was no "Catholic culture" as we associate it with Christendom on. I'm thinking it is more useful and to the point to imagine myself, as a Christian, living in the time of Domitian, than thinking that the answer is to try to recreated 13th century Italy. As I've written before, as the witness of Ireland and Quebec show so painfully--is there a shadow to "Catholic culture"? As there is a shadow to everything?

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Balkinization: Marty Lederman vs John Yoo:

...Why was this the one point of absolute consensus within the Administration? Isn't that odd -- that the easy point of unanimous agreement was to keep our detention operations outside of our own nation, above all else? It's not as if these captured persons were all detained where they were found. No -- they were shipped halfway around the world; but instead of, say, detaining them at a military brig in South Carolina, which would have been the logical plan, the planes and ships made a sharp left turn at the last moment so that these folks would disembark in Cuba, which is less than 100 miles from the Florida coast.

The reason, of course, for such a resolute determination to keep the detainees offshore, was (as John quite candidly writes) because the lawyers assumed GTMO was a law-free zone -- a location impervious to any judicial oversight. And of course, in light of what we were doing to these detainees, there was damn good reason to keep our operations out the plain sight of any courts, lest they have the temerity to insist that the Administration follow the law.

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and Brian Tamanaha tells a story I am linking because it interests me, not because I endorse any underlying purposes or assumptions (whereas I think I do endorse the Lederman post in content and purpose--I don't know nearly enough to do more than find the Tamanaha post interesting):

...I am able to recount the details of this event because the assistant federal public defender was me, handling the case in the mid-1980s. To recap the hard-to-believe basics of the situation: in the middle of a trial, I was charged with three criminal offenses on the grounds that the questions I asked in open court prompted the witnesses to disclose classified information. At the time of these supposed offenses, the prosecutors objected neither to the questions nor the answers, and neither they nor the judge gave any indication of a problem until the moment the charges were lodged against me. So there I was, still handling the ongoing trial, but now also facing my own trial to begin 30 days after the current trial was over. Despite my compromised position, I was not allowed by the judge to withdraw as defense counsel, and our request for a mistrial in the ongoing case was denied. I continued to examine witnesses from the CIA, but now with pending criminal charges hanging over my head, and a real prospect of more to come.

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