DO THE RIGHT THING: I don't care much about Tolkein, but I liked how this post (via Wesley Hill) delineates two different kinds of morality tale: the one about the difficulty of knowing which choice is right, and the one about the difficulty of doing the good even when you know it.

Tangentially: I've just watched two recent adaptations of Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest. I really don't approve of how much they mistrust their audience (they're very tarted-up with chase scenes and self-referential inside jokes and that sort of thing, and the language is mostly simplified) so I don't think I recommend them, even though I did like a lot of things I think most people wouldn't, such as Minnie Driver. I always like her. Anyway, the story of An Ideal Husband is strong enough that it's still very moving. Earnest is harder to get right--so much of its humor depends on the contrast between the ridiculous triviality of its characters' scruples and objections, and the genuine emotional weight of those scruples' consequences. You have to make it both dizzy and poignant.

Both of them are morality plays, of course; in Husband the wrongdoing is really serious, while in Earnest it's the exact opposite of that. There's a sort of meta-moral to be drawn from the fact that the forgiveness which makes the comedic ending possible is the same in both plays.

JESUS CAMP: So, a few scattered thoughts on Decadence and Catholicism, now that I've finally finished it.

If you're interested in its subject, you should read it! I enjoyed Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture more, partly b/c Roden quotes more than Hanson does and therefore gets out of the way more, and partly b/c I just think e.g. Gerard Hopkins and Eliza Kearney are more talented than John Gray and--yeah, I'll say it--Verlaine. Although I do want to read Ronald Firbank now. Anyway yeah, there's a lot of good stuff in this book.

It does have its deficiencies. Hanson is often overly abstract for my taste. Quote more, bubbitz less. I disagree with some of his interpretations of Wilde's work, and think he's being overly defensive in response to (what I agree are) overly Catholic-apologetic readings of Wilde.

Hanson sometimes writes like two specific kinds of undergraduate: the Objectivist who thinks people only ever act out of self-interest (in Hanson's case, "pleasure"), and the *~*edgy*~* pomo for whom pursuit of truth is only interesting if it can be cast as an especially complex form of lying. Both of those stances allow Hanson to achieve some real insights, about e.g. the pleasures of shame or sacrifice and the ways in which confessions can serve to conceal the self as much as reveal it, but when he gets too insistent I find I have limited patience. If shame is only another shade of self-indulgence then personal choice and pleasure are valorized to an extent I find banal. ...Also, the epilogue is intermittently petulant. I'm sorry John Paul II was more popular than you.

But I didn't expect an orthodox perspective when I opened this book, so really, I got exactly what I came for, and I'm grateful for that. Again, if you're interested in the decadents or in the erotics of Catholicism, you should read this.

Although the remark is witty and ironic, Wilde recognized the potential of beautiful performative acts, such as taking Communion, to determine the imaginative framework through which the world is perceived.
--Decadence and Catholicism

I like this b/c it reminds me of "The Snow Queen," with the glass in Kay's eye. (Want to know what the "remark" was? Read the book!)

HE WALKED DOWN PICCADILLY/WITH A POPPY AND A LILY: Lovely photo of Wilde's grave. (Scroll down.) Santo subito!

Via Rattus.

The last bus I missed to Maudlin Street,
so you drove me home in the van
saying, "Women only watch me
for my blogs..."

Sean Collins says more or less what I thought about Danica Novgorodoff's Slow Storm comic... except that he was easier on white-$#@!up Ursa than I was. But yeah, the art is amazing.

Maggie Gallagher on Ricky Gervais vs. Oscar Wilde (yeah, you have to fight through some partisanage, but it's worth it--scroll until you hit the Wildery if you have to).

Mark Shea on converts vs. cradle Catholics--yeah, I think this is a good assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of all us messed-up popish folk.

L'OSSERVATORE ROMANO ON OSCAR WILDE. I am contractually obligated to provide you with this link! (...I wouldn't wade into the comments if I were you.)

THE SEASONS COME, THE SEASONS GO: Notes about various things which have spanned my personal, furry-book boundary between spring and summer. In roughly chronological order.

Edmund White, The Married Man. At least one reviewer believed this to be White's best book. I can't imagine how that could be true.

It's a fairly standard account of gay love and death, enhanced by a few terrific turns of phrase and obviously by the subject matter, and nearly destroyed by a midsection devoted to hating America.

No, for real, give me a moment: I don't like Providence, RI either. And I even can see that perhaps the overdone buzzsaw-whine of this section was meant to be unattractive--we're shown, for example, that the narrator is busy destroying the tacky home he's subletting, and his dog menaces the local children while reeking horrid smells from some kind of gland in his ass... and yet, despite that, the dog is a Mary Sue (everyone loves him in the end! Except me!) and no matter how valid your critique of America is, fifty pages of humorless whining is really, really tiresome.

Once the book leaves New England, everything gets better, but really the best parts of this book are a fairly good novel, whereas Nocturnes for the King of Naples is a masterpiece. Read that instead.

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring: This is a movie set at a Buddhist hermit's retreat. It is one of those gems thrown onto the shore by my Netflix account, so old and random that I have no idea why I ever requested it.

It's predictably beautiful, predictably recurrent, and perhaps predictably tragic. But there's a portrayal of penance (in the Fall section) which I hope will stick with me as long as I live. I don't know if it can even be called penance, really: It's punishment transformed into sublime beauty, and yet there's no explicit notice of forgiveness. Can there really be penance in a world where no God nor afterlife will offer complete reconciliation, complete and therefore unimaginable healing of our irrevocable acts? (The first section really hammers this home, as well, and does a great job of preparing us for the Fall section.)

I'd show this to a catechism class, if anyone would let me teach one. I think it's an amazing jumping-off point for a discussion of guilt, penance, forgiveness, loyalty, and sublimity.

I'd also very strongly recommend this to fans of The Mission, for the obvious compare/contrast.

E.F. Bentley, Trent's Last Case: Both Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers wrote gushing blurbs for this fairly standard, well-written mystery. It is okay. The very last revelation is quite fun. I guessed 1 1/2 of the twists before that one, which, given my record with Christie (only one accurate guess ever), suggests that this is perhaps not so unexpected as all that.

The writing is very easy and pleasant. The paleoconservatism is not my imagination--finance, and abstracted capitalism generally, are thoroughly demonized; but perhaps more interestingly than that, this book made me realize that if you beat up on deracinated cosmopolites you will necessarily also target anyone who would be unwelcome in the heartland. Some people are deracinated for a reason.

I really did like seeing the beginnings of new technologies, e.g. the page-and-a-half (?) description of fingerprint powder. I'd also recommend the fingerprint passage to anyone who wants to learn how to do exposition in a fun way.

Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love: Thin Victoriana.

I was honestly the worst audience for this, but really, just reading the biographies of the men involved would give you a more complex picture of this era. This is AE Housman filed down to almost nothing, which is poignant I guess, but deeply self-comforting for our own era. Is there a fight here? I mean, is there any kind of tension whatsoever, with at least two competing sides? I don't see it.

Wilde, a simplistic movie, did better with Wilde; the most interesting thing in the Stoppard, for me, was the use of the ancient gods. He does that in Rock 'n' Roll, too. Is this just a sentimental sediment of Christianity, or are the gods doing something else and irreducible?

The House that Screamed/La Residencia: So you can see this on IMDB tv, as I did, because it was featured on "Movie Macabre"--a series I think all red-blooded Americans will remember as "Elvira, Mistress of the Dark." Revisiting the series has been something of a disappointment for me.

But this installment is... memorable. I suspect the Spanish title really translates as "The Residential School," in which case... yeah. It's Catholic abuse exploitation a-go-go. Smokin' hot chicks in corsets getting whipped and so forth. It's impossible for me to recommend this, but star Lilli Palmer is amazingly beautiful; I was genuinely, if miserably, fascinated to see how the Spanish production team worked out any cultural anxieties about the power of the Church (yes, there is a scene where nice reform-school girls saying their prayers are intercut with a bad reform-school girl getting beaten); and I think the whole cultural positioning of this movie is sickly fascinating given What We Now Know about how horrific the residential schools really were. This seems like the kind of movie you only make in that slipping-off-the-tightrope cultural moment when you know the Church has become complicit in horrible crimes and yet you haven't acknowledged those crimes, so it's still kind of B-movie, popcorn.

Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography, and biography is the mesh through which our real life escapes.
--character of Oscar Wilde, in Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

YOU LOSE YOUR GRIP/AND THEN YOU SLIP/INTO THE MASTERPIECE. Conservative aesthetics; and why you should be grateful to be one of the gouged-out sculptures of God.

I guess they won't
exchange the gifts
that you were meant to keep....

THINGS I'M READING: The NY Sun retrospective at Culture11... anytime you namecheck J. Jonah Jameson you get my attention!

Helen Rittelmeyer's senior essay: "Decadence, Christianity, And Oscar Wilde's Conversion to Catholicism." Profound and provocative. Your must-read for the day.

Nicola Karras's reply to objections.

PoMoCon praising Nalin Ranasinghe's literary look at Plato. I must read this!!!

YEAH.

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....)