She's my bus seductress, she smells of old cash,
Drinks Guinness off-duty, eats blogwatch and mash...

Light on Dark Water: "The Truth Hurts So This Should Be Painless"....

Megan McArdle: A reading list for an economic crisis. You know, in case you happen to run into one somewhere.

Postmodern Conservative: Ten songs for mass transit.

Claw of the Conciliator tipped me off to a fascinating interview with John K. of Propagandhi and (more relevantly to my interests!) the Weakerthans, in the current issue of Winnipeg's Geez magazine. Includes quite a bit of stuff about his religious upbringing and its influence on his songwriting.... Not online, but you can order it here.

And this poem, which I found via this interview with Helen Rittelmeyer, is much weirder and more awesome than it might at first appear. Check it out!

TOOK YOU UP TO MIDNIGHT MASS, LEFT YOU IN THE LURCH: I realize that this whole conversation about shame might be better if I suggested an actual occasion on which I'd acted wrongly due to shame, as vs. guilt. The obvious one for me is that I don't go to Confession out of shame. I do not recommend this. I went on Saturday and it was amazingly awesome, as (almost) always. When I don't go, I get in this awful downward spiral of "it doesn't matter anyway, what's the worst thing I can do?" It's... kind of frightening, honestly, how far past your own limits you can go before the humiliation of Confession is better than the fetid crawlspace in which you're living.

Obviously, this is a failure of both guilt and shame! But the thing that stops me from coming back up to the surface is shame, and the thing that forces me to come back anyway is guilt.

I really, deeply don't believe that ethics are the sum and summit of the Christian life. If I had to pick something, I think I'd pick the Eucharist: the consummation of God's love affair with us.

And I think this rejection of ethics-uber-alles is relevant in two ways: 1) Shame is community property--the domain of ethics, the domain of humans negotiating life with humans rather than the domain of humans pouring themselves out in the humiliating, confusing, transcendent love of God; and yet 2) Deus Caritas Est is right that love of others is sturdiest when it's based on the Eucharist. I can't count the times I've finally surrendered and confessed because I had to counsel at the pregnancy center that night. Love beyond ethics strengthens ethics.

And I think that's because the Mass, the Wedding Feast of the Lamb, is the model of how to make one's life an icon of love. "Charity" gets a bad rep for condescension. I think for the people for whom it is genuinely the Wedding Feast--the people who can live at all hours within the Mass--there's no condescension. I would rather think about how to live that way than think about how to properly shame one another....

PASSION WENT OUT OF FASHION--THAT'S ALL YOU'RE CONCERNED WITH: There's an interesting catfight about gender going on in Helen's comments here. It's intra-Yalien in the most desperate way, but I think her fashion metaphor is both interesting and profound. Obviously it doesn't work in a lot of ways, but she knows that, and it's worth taking the time to walk around inside the metaphor for a while, see how it's shaped and what it changes about your views, rather than dismissing it because of the obvious ways in which it's false. Or to put it more bluntly, I think you'd have to get up early to do a critique of this metaphor which it wouldn't've already anticipated.

Also: If I had two wishes which could not be applied to anything other than debates about gender on the Interwebs, my wishes would be these: 1) You do not get to pretend that men caring for their children is obvious and unshakable, and 2) You do not get to pretend that we have made intercourse manageable. Those aren't even disagreements about what is beautiful or sublime; they just require us to acknowledge dumb basic facts about sex, pregnancy, parenthood, and children in the USA right this minute.

I'm not on her side re: shame, but you knew that.

(Well shoot, as long as I'm here, I'll also recommend Truffaut on "the Ursula Andress of militancy.")

ROMOPHOBIA--THE WORST DISEASE: Speaking of things I haven't read yet, the Cigarette Smoking Blogger has posted her senior essay: "Decadence, Christianity, and Oscar Wilde's Conversion to Catholicism." I've been putting it off for fear that reading it will cause me to explode from sheer awesome.

(Was a bit conflicted whether this post title was the best possible punk reference; would also entertain nominations of, "When Two Heavens Clash." 1877, and we are going mad....)