Archives for August 2006

Gawker’s Already Over feature trains its world-weary gaze on its own town:

“Right now, as you read this, millions of kids around the world are thinking, I’m going to grow up and move to New York, where people will understand me. Those kids are douchebags, but, more importantly, they’re right: They will be understood by the douchebags already here. They will also be resented, backstabbed, and made fun of for their unfamiliarity with the ways of the city by people who have conveniently forgotten their own, slightly less recent, unfamiliarity. New York is, at this point, a giant recycling factory, unable to contribute anything new to the culture while proclaiming that the latest remix is actually a bold step in a new direction.”

Self-loathing is the new boosterism.

(Language gets a little blue if you follow the link.)

People of the Book links to an essay that argues for the compatibility, perhaps even the advantage, of a Catholic sensibility in the literary realm.

Teaser sentence: “Without a sacramental theology, and specifically a theology of sacramental action, Protestant writers cannot do justice to this world or show that this world is the theater of God’s redeeming action.”

This put me in mind of John Updike’s Introduction to Soundings in Satanism (can you tell I once had a contract to write a book on the devil?). The intro begins: “Most of the contributors to this volume are Catholic or European or both; an American Protestant feels an understandable diffidence at leading such a parade, as it confidently marches from the mustering ground of biblical exegesis into the weird mashes of possession, exorcism, and witchcraft and onto the familiar firm terrain of psychopathology and literary criticism…Can evil be a personal, dynamic principle? The suggestion seems clownish; instinctively, we reject it. If we must have a supernatural, at the price of intelluctual scandal, at least let it be a minimal supernatural, clean, monotonous, hygenic, featureless – just a little supernatural, as the unwed mother said of her baby…Alas, we have become, in our Protestantism, more virtuous than the myths that taught us virtue; we judge them barbaric.”

You come to realize that it’s not enough to put them in the same house with clothes and food and then expect them to dress and feed themselves in the morning. You come to realize that if you do not walk the extra mile, the authorities will discover them, naked and starving in their rooms, their faces masks of puzzlement over the fact that somehow, contrary to logic and expectations, reading comics and bickering failed to provide for their most basic needs.

They teach you focus. This from my eight-month-old: “See, Dad, you’re trying to keep me from crawling toward the computer and swatting at the keyboard as you sit here on the floor, ostensibly minding me. BUT, you’re also trying to read something on that computer, and manipulate that keyboard. You lack focus. I, on the other hand, have but a single goal. And I’ve got nothing else to do today.”

For example…

They wake you up after four hours of sleep – ah, the joys of changing time zones – just to let you know how happy they are to be home, and how much they want to spend time with their father. They believed you when you said you missed them, and they give you a chance to show it, to strive after that great consistency between word and will and deed.

….thanks, once again, to the Power of the Internets!

So the WSJ did a story on the Ave Maria School of Law, a story which recounted some of the deep, deep troubles at the place – troubles which I will not attempt to explain here, becuase they are treated with much more knowledge and detail elsewhere. Fumare, for example, is all over the recent non re-hiring of Professor/Former Board member Charles Rice. (Be aware – they definitely take a particular side in the debate.) And because they are tracking the story so closely, they noticed a post-publication change in the story as it appeared online. This:

A number of professors have resigned; some have launched lawsuits; the contract of a prominent emeritus professor from Notre Dame was not renewed. Faculty reported the college’s administration to the Department of Education for fraud involving financial aid in 2002. (The school denied any wrongdoing, but paid back about $300,000; the investigation hasn’t been concluded.) And now one of those professors has been told that he must recant his testimony to department officials if he wants his contract renewed. (A university official acknowledged this was true, which may leave the school open to criminal conspiracy charges.)

Became this:

A number of professors have resigned; some have launched lawsuits; the contract of a prominent emeritus professor from Notre Dame was not renewed. Faculty members reported the college’s administration to the Department of Education for fraud involving financial aid in 2002. The school denied any wrongdoing but paid back about $300,000. An investigation by the education department’s inspector general hasn’t been concluded.

Gosh, what happened to those last couple of sentences? Fortunately, Google caught, er, cached the the original version.

Again, I’m not breaking this story, and I repeat all this here because it’s kind of fascinating, journalism-wise.

Okay, so last time I did a link to a mildly sacreligious comic strip, I got in a little trouble with my commenters. But I laughed at this.