…because they also have a house of words.

Si monumentum requiris, circumspice.

(“If you would see his monument, look around.”)

- 17^th century English architect Sir Christopher Wren’s epitaph, inscribed on his tomb in his greatest work, St. Paul’s Cathedral, London

ROLLING GROUND – In the young days of the 20th century, automobiles were still a novelty – and often eschewed by the older folk who saw in these horseless carriages the dawning of a new age speeding toward them.

But they probably did not fear Henry Ford’s wonderful invention – the mass-produced production-line-assembled automobile – so much as they feared the way this machine threatened their slower-paced and simpler life – especially as it was found in the rural areas of southwestern Wisconsin.

A visitor motoring in one of these new-fangled machines through the Kickapoo Valley region might have caught a glimpse of one such lover of simplicity. A stocky figure humping it along the unpaved back roads, this individual invariably would appear with a hod over his one shoulder and a bag of tools hanging from the other.

As the visitor chugged past at the dizzying speed of 30 miles an hour, perhaps this lone figure would pause in his travels, tip his hat and flash a grin which could charm a calf from its mother.

“Another of those horseless contraptions,” he might think, still grinning and shaking his head in amused disapproval as he continued on his way.

This figure strolling at an even pace along the unpaved back roads was a common sight for the people of the Kickapoo region – places like Rolling Ground, Blue River, Gays Mills, Soldiers Grove and places like Tavera (which no longer exists except as a single weathered shack sinking into the Kickapoo marshlands).

He eventually became something of a legend in the area. His name was James Clancy. He carried a hod. He was a stone mason. But it was more than his job – it was the source of the legend he built up with each stone laid.

Some say he believed in the “little people” – and wouldn’t be caught dead in a cemetery at night. But others who knew him better say it wasn’t true. He was actually less superstitious than most.

Others say he graced everything he touched with a down-to-business talent that borders on the miraculous. And to see his work is to see the miracle of rock still standing on rock almost a hundred years later, looking like it did the day he finished scraping the last of the excess mortar into a bucket. Still plumb. Still level. Still flush. Still standing.

According to his 1924 passport, Clancy was a transplanted Irish stone mason. He sported a thatch of grey-hair, blue eyes as piercing as Galway Bay on a sunny day, and a mysterious scar sculpted along his right jaw.

What the passport fails to mention is that he had a playful wit every bit as sharp-edged as his mortar’s trowel. And more often than not, the target of the wit was his cousin, Michael Kinney, with whom he came to live.

There was the time, for example, when a traveling salesman wandered onto the Kinney farm and came across Clancy attending to some task in the front yard.

“I’m looking for Mr. Michael Kinney,” the salesman announced.

“Well, he’s in the pig barn right now,” Clancy said, looking up from his business. “But if you want to know which one is him, he’ll be the one wearin’ the hat.”

Clancy was born and raised in what was then known as King’s County, Ireland, before coming to the U.S. Located in the central region of Ireland, the county has since been renamed County Offaly after Ireland gained its independence from British rule in 1922.

He settled in rural southwest Wisconsin in 1911 (although other sources say 1912). But between the hazy distance of the dead and buried to the middle ground of the not quite dead and buried, the dates don’t matter as much maybe as the people who lived and moved through these calendar squares of days long gone.

And for St. Philip’s parishioners and cousins James Gorman and Jack Kinney, Clancy the Stonewaller is in many ways still very much alive. After all, Clancy wasn’t just a neighbor to these two cousins. He was family.

A third cousin to Jack Kinney and Gorman, Clancy was related to the Kinneys and Gormans on his mother’s side, according to Jack.

Coming for a visit, he appeared on Jack Kinney’s father’s doorstep. And true to form, he moved in with the Kinneys with less to-do than dusting lint from under a bed.

“He just showed up one day and said, ‘We’re related,’” Jack Kinney recalled. “He moved in and began working around the area as a stone mason. That’s about it.”

“He came for a visit at first, but I guess he liked it so much around here that he decided to stay for good.”

“When he first came to the area,” Gorman, a parishioner at St. Philips, Rolling Ground, added, “no one knew who he was until my uncle (Mike Kinney) took a chance on him. He built his first barn in 1912 – and after that, well after that he got lots of business.”

Among the greatest contributions Clancy made to the community was a structure practically unheard of in this region of southwestern Wisconsin – until the advent of Clancy – the stone-built silo.

“We had silos of course, but very few silos in the area were built from stone,” Gorman noted. “Clancy built one of the first.”

As Clancy’s godson as well as his cousin, Jack Kinney remembers with warmth the friendship that sprang up between the two men.

Like many of the men in the area, Clancy liked to play euchre and used to go down to Soldiers Grove on Sunday afternoons – which had about 10 or 12 saloons back then.

“I was 11 years old at the time, and he’d take me down to the Grove with him. Well, he’d play euchre and I’d drink strawberry pop until it came out of my ears. He’d drink some, too, mostly beer. But he’d be snoozing well before we got to town – unless he was driving, which wasn’t very often.”

According to Kinney, even after he purchased his own vehicle, he preferred to leave the driving to others.

“He was a wild driver,” Kinney remarked. “So he’d make me drive – and I was still only 11 years old at the time. When Clancy was asked if it was wise to let an 11 year old drive him, he’d reply, ‘Oh no, with Jack here I’m as safe as in my mother’s arms, I am.’”

Jim Gorman remembered exactly how poor a driver Clancy could be.

“He was constantly slipping that clutch – wouldn’t get far before the car was rocking and jerking around,” Gorman added.

“But once he got down to Madison,” Jack recalled, “and turned left on the square where the Capitol building is. Well, everyone knows you can only turn right onto the square.

“So it wasn’t long before a motorcycle cop comes along and pulls Clancy over.

“’Don’t you know this is a one way street, mister?’ the cop says to him. ‘Well then, begorrah, why don’t you have the rest of the traffic goin’ one way?’ Clancy says to him.

“And that cop – well, he just smiled – then he parked his motorcycle and came back to the car, told Clancy to shove over and asked him where he wanted to be driven. I guess he took a liking to him.”

And that was generally the way of it with Clancy, Gorman noted. “He had lots of friends, but really no enemies to speak of.”

As for the first time Clancy laid eyes on the Capitol building itself, Gorman said that Clancy’s sole comment was typical of his tendency for understatement.

“First thing he saw it and said, ‘So that’s the capitol – well, begorry, it is quite a shed…’”

Photosource

Jack pointed out that Clancy was happy just to walk before he ever bought a car – sometimes up to 15 miles – from job to job, raising silos and barns around the region.

While Jack Kinney and Gorman feel fortunate to have known this thick-set Irishman up through his time of death, they both admit that they didn’t fully appreciate the fact that a living legend had taken up residence under their own roof.

Clancy returned to his homeland in 1916 – and stayed until 1924. Some speculate that his stay was extended because of World War I – which began the year he left and would officially end with a peace treaty signed in 1919. Others say his homesickness drew him back to the Island of Saints – and only when his siblings and relatives died did he decide to strike out for America again, this time for good, as there was little else to tie him to his birthplace.

According to his cousins, Clancy had a pair of shoulders as wide as his thick arms were short. He was a man of few words, for sure –  and an engine with two speeds – full throttle or impatient idle.

“His hands were always clenched into fists,” Gorman explained. “He was always clenching and unclenching them at the dinner table.”

His tastes – at table and in the pew – ran to the simple. Potatoes. A pint of beer. Faith in God. Potatoes. The sacraments. Devotion to Our Lady. Potatoes. Satisfaction in a job well done. And more potatoes.

As a matter of fact, he enjoyed potatoes so much – he thought that when a neighbor was serving them for dinner the delectable spuds were meant for him alone.

“Hold on fellow!” said his host as he saw Clancy take the steaming bowl of potatoes and place them on his own plate. “You know we all eat potatoes around here!”

It was while at dinner table that Clancy’s hatred and fear of cats came out, as well. According to Jack Kinney, one evening while eating at the Kinney table, one unfortunate member of this species decided to sharpen its claws on Clancy’s shin. Without much of a stir, Jack reported, “Clancy took his butter knife and thumped that cat on the head. Laid it out dead. He looked down at the cat dead there on the floor and then went back to eating as if nothing had happened.”

Like a rural Christopher Wren, Clancy was prolific in and around the Rolling Ground area. His work rises at strong intervals in the pitching landscape – whether it be stone silos, barn foundations, walls – or even a grotto to Our Lady of Lourdes located at St. Philip cemetery.

Indeed, at this cemetery, a visitor can see this monument to his faith – and devotion to the Blessed Virgin – but the visitor will also find a monument to his faith in square, chisel, trowel and hod.

Perhaps it was an early spring day; the sun bright as it began its climb up Clancy’s back to the high light of summer. Clancy was beginning work on a wall that would curb the advance of the cemetery’s shifting soil – part of the rolling ground of Rolling Ground.

Back then, Old Highway 171 separated the living and the dead at St. Philip’s, putting the cemetery on one side of the busy east/west road and the church on the other.

For his part, Clancy merrily began to fit stone and mortar. At high noon, perhaps he stepped back from his work for a moment. His morning labor already brought the wall up to his shins.

Clearly, he thought to himself, progress is being made.

Just then he heard the sharp clap of hooves on gravel. A neighboring farmer was coming up the road. He stopped, tipped his hat against the blazing sun and watched Clancy walling in the cemetery.

“It’ll never last,” the farmer said after a while with a horsey shake of his head. “It’ll be spilling out into the road within five years.”

As if just acknowledging the farmer’s presence, Clancy straightened up abruptly and with a grin as wide as a tombstone, he eyed the farmer for a few moments – and suddenly winked at him.

“I’ll tell you what, mister,” he began to assert with the immediate muster of his well-intoned brogue. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the cemetery. “You’ll be on that side of this wall before this wall is on that side of the road!”

And as any visitor to St. Philip’s can attest, Clancy’s words proved prophetic. No one knows for sure who the farmer was that offered his two cents only to have Clancy handing him back change. But it’s a safe bet he’s buried on the other side of Clancy’s still neatly cropped wall.

“Clancy’s probably got a lot of monuments around this area,” Gorman noted, “but that wall and grotto are probably his best.”

He built the grotto in honor of Our Lady of Lourdes and St. Bernadette, both of whose statues appear in the grotto. Clancy built the devotional site by commission. Rose Bannen, a fellow parishioner who shared in Clancy’s devotion to the Blessed Virgin, commissioned him to build the modestly majestic structure at the top of the cemetery hill.

Regarding his final visit to the cemetery, Clancy’s death was much like his life. According to Jack Kinney, he recalls him being fit and active pretty much until the end.

“He was planning to make a return to Ireland and was going to take me with him,” Jack Kinney said.

But then one day he fell ill. The doctors said it was liver cancer. But as in most things, Clancy wasn’t going to stick around long to make a fuss. Within a year of diagnosis, on August 4, 1948, Clancy was heading off for the great quarry of souls in the sky.

His funeral was well attended, Gorman related. A simple affair with his American friends and family as pallbearers, the event welcomed people from around the countryside. They all crowded into St. Philip’s to pay their last respects to a man whose tireless love for stonecraft was a permanent fixture of the landscape.

As for his worldly possessions, fittingly he left his car to his unofficial chauffeur and beloved Godson, Jack, while he spread his money among relatives – including a surviving niece back in Ireland.

Among the many mysteries that have puzzled people who knew Clancy, though, perhaps the most pressing is the question of his tools. What ever became of them? Perhaps they were secretly buried with him. Or maybe they faded into the background – hung on some forgotten hook like a cryptic epitaph in one of the barns Clancy built.

Or perhaps the tools passed into the possession of others – those who were borrowing them from Clancy at the time of his death, or those who bought them at this or that auction over the years.

But that Clancy himself lived and breathed and built and built in the Rolling Ground area is no mystery. His monuments can be seen today. But if you ask Jack Kinney and Jim Gorman, they’ll tell you there’s no rush to see the things Clancy did with stone and mortar.

Those silos and barn foundations, that wall and that grotto – they’ll all be around looking pretty much like they did when the mortar was still drying on them – and probably for long time after the last automobile breaks down.…

Damon Linker at The Week stops short of saying the popes were/are right, but it’s a clear to those “who have eyes” that it comes to the same thing:

Permitting gay marriage will not lead Americans to stop thinking of marriage as a conjugal union. Quite the reverse: Gay marriage has come to be widely accepted because our society stopped thinking of marriage as a conjugal union decades ago.

The most astounding implication in Linker’s piece, though, is the suggested thesis that without religion there is no hope for heterosexual marriage. Is that the case? Is it really up to us, whether we like it or not, to reaffirm the baby-making aspect of marriage, whether we like it or not, as the popes have from the day Peter slipped the Church’s Yales on his ring?

That’s not quite sporting, if you ask me. Remember when those wigged-out Enlightenment chaps assured us that they was taking care of civilization and all that stuff? “Now you good Churchy-Goddy types, don’t you worry your poor little heads off – we’ve got it all taken care of. Go off and do your – well, whatever it is you do behind those closed doors on Sundays, and let us sweep up the public square for you. It will be as good as new – and so clean, you’ll hardly recognize it. Really. Trust us.”

Now what? They’re saying they can’t figure this thing out with reason alone? What in Sam Hill is up with that?

JOB

It began with a phone call from my mother letting me know my Uncle Jack was dying (he passed from this life quietly and peacefully on May 29, his beloved family – and many of his 11 kids by his side. He was, as the last-cited integers might suggest, an inspiration and a role model for me).

At any rate, the goal was to fly solo to NJ and visit with my uncle in his last days. Like a hermit crab, though, with each passing minute of the announcement to depart forthwith to my home state, the journey/baggage was quickly developing by accretion .  First it was the two oldest offspring – both licensed drivers who could share the burden of time behind the wheel (18-20 hours, five states, and lots of Ohio farmland, depending on travelers’ Gatorade intake); then our German exchange student wanted to come along – she had never seen NYC before (and to be fair, I encouraged her to come); then it was most everyone but Mama, who would stay behind with the youngest.

In the end, we all- Papa, Mama and ten of the younger set – from four months to 17 years old - piled into “Driver 8 [+2],” the fifteen-passenger white Ford van and posing as a Baptist Church evangelizing team we were heading east.

Well, of course, as part of the visit to NJ, we had to hit New York – and hit it we did…hard. On Memorial Day. (“Everyone’s goin’ to the shaw for Mahmorial Day – no sweat.”)

Um. Nope.

Everyone was either hitting the shore points OR staying in NYC – and cramming Central Park around midday.  Interim, Papa Joe enlisted the help of his dear older sister to herd eight or nine teens/preteens (I can’t really remember how many -

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you…)

on a walking tour of NYC.

We weathered the crowds well – no one of our party getting unnecessarily lost – although we came close at one point with some nonsense that involved some preteen female interest in posing with a rather Ab-centric Abercrombie & Fitch model.

We traveled south from Madison Square Garden and inched our way to Times Square and then from there over to Central Park and then back again to MSG – and Penn Station. There was absolutely nothing to do that didn’t cost more money than a father of a large family could spare to part with. It was, in two words, economically prohibitive. I know you don’t care, Mr. Cuomo and Mr. Bloomberg; but there it is.

Never mind the details – suffice it to say that the experience of being practically mugged by Elmo, Cookie Monster, two Iron Men, the Statue of Liberty and I think a couple Power Rangers, although they may have been Iron Men too, proved that just as the business of America is business, so the hustle and bustle of NYC is a bustling hustle. In Times Square experience dressed as innocence seeks out the tourists – especially the ones with cameras (although I suppose that’s redundant) and glom them for a picture and a mandatory tip. In case you need a hint, the belligerent buffos all carry mail pouches with “TIPS” stenciled in an ink black high-grade military font.

Never have I felt more exploited…. Rubbing the NaCl into the wound, as I passed one Iron Man, he murmured to me, “Hey, Dad, smile, why don’t you? – it’s almost over.”

As far as I can tell, our walking route took us east from MSG to the Empire State Building down 34th Street. We then hooked a left and headed north up 5th Avenue to 42th St., hooked another left until we hit Times Square (Broadway and 7th), got mugged by human-sized Muppets, then continued up 7th Ave. and hooked a right onto 49th St. and visited the golden guy at Rockefeller Center. We then continued on 49th and turned left on 5th Ave and proceeded on to Central Park, entered through the southwestern corner, enjoyed the sunning turtles in one of the little watering holes they keep for maintaining the sanity of the odd Country Mouse who happens to visit the Big Apple, ate hot pretzels for lunch, and exited the park from the south. From there we continued down 6th Ave., passed Macy’s and on back to our train.

A few incidents of note: My children, being Eloise fans, did their darndest to get kicked out of the Plaza Hotel. The doorman shooed them out in grand style.

On our way up 5th Ave., I saw the ghost of Walker Percy. A man who looked pretty much like the coveting curmudgeon of Covington was standing next to one of those typical Manhattan newsstand kiosks plastered with paper flesh. For all I know he could have been a ghost as he stood there, stock-still. He was wearing formal slacks, a striped dress shirt open at the collar, and had slung a sports coat over his left shoulder in the casual fashion of one taking a look at the horses as they entered the track. He looked neither hurried nor worried. Instead, he was gazing up at the skyscrapers, the way one gazes up at the ceiling when one’s heard a bad joke, a sardonic grin on his face as if both amused and amazed that so much humanity could be so lost.

Perhaps to drive the point home, not far from the newsstand where Percy’s ghost lingered, we passed the 5th Ave. Presbyterian Church. The letter sign out front announced in the familiar chunky black plastic lettering, the weekend sermon: “The Blessings of Being Lost.”

Then, not long after this – or perhaps before it – I discovered the first payoff for Papa on  his Manhattan meandering:

The very place that the Man in the Perpetual Hat, Maxwell Perkins, received  F. Scott, Ernest, and Thomas Wolfe – not to mention Marjorie Rawlings and James Jones.

Best story about Perkins. Charles Scribner was notorious for running an upright ship and so when the young Turks – Fitzgerald, Hemingway, et al, started coming on as Scribner authors, Perkins had a jolly time of it persuading Scribner to allow for profanity. Scribner stuck to his guns, though, and gave Perkins a list of words he was not allowed to have appear in Scribner books: fuck, shit, piss.

Of course, as Scribner handed down his orders by phone, Perkins, desperate to catch the list before his boss hung up, wrote it down on his desk calendar. Some days later, Hemingway came for a visit and saw the list as Perkins had written it. “Jesus, Max! Are you that busy, you need to schedule these things in advance?” or something to that effect. (I might have some of the players confused, but you get the general drift.)

I mentioned that my daughters – mostly my third-born – were desperate to see the Plaza Hotel. On our way up 5th Ave. I happened to catch the glint off a rather largish brass plate affixed to the pale grey brick of an anonymous building. I stopped long enough to realize it accomplished the hat trick for my literary pilgrimage.

Howells it was who first taught me to fall in love with money, you see. But not in the way you might think. Here’s the opening paragraph of what I wrote to get an MA from University of Dallas:

In  many ways, by the time The Rise of Silas Latham by William Dean Howells was published in 1885, the novel as an art form had come into its own in America. The literary landscape first formed by the novels of Melville and Hawthorne was beginning to take on a more definite shape by the time Howells’ groundbreaking novel came on the scene. Lapham was published in America the same year as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) and only eight years after Henry James’ The American (1877), both of which novels broke new ground in their own right regarding the dawning self-awareness of the American character. For Twain, Huckleberry Finn’s unique articulation (in his own dialect no less) of the American scene could never be mistaken for the observations of a European. Likewise, as his name suggests Christopher Newman goes to Europe bearing the new American character with a certain blend of innocence and experience that James valued not only for the ambiguity it provided for James but also for the contrast it provided to the European character.

Howells’ work, though, stands at a kind of midpoint between the nativism of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and the sophisticated continentalism of James’ The American.  Indeed, Howells distinguished himself in the New England cradle of American intellectualism with his own brand of sophistication, yet he retained enough of his Ohio back-woods roots to recognize that the natural speech and homegrown culture of America were fair game for great literature. But Howells’ gentle satire contrasted greatly with Twain’s more acerbic wit; and his understanding of high society remained that of an outsider, a Yankee for sure, but one whose roots ran to the wilderness of the Mississippi rather than to the banks of the more cosmopolitan Charles River of Boston’s aristocracy…  

- LOCATING MORAL CAPITAL IN THE COMMERCIAL REPUBLIC: A STUDY OF WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS’ THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM

Similarly, professional sports in the US always had a strongly corporate, upper-middle-class air. For instance, the most celebrated game in professional football history, Broadway Joe Namath’s New York Jets’ victory over the Baltimore Colts in the 1969 Super Bowl, was a victory for the national media’s home team.

In the 1890s, baseball’s sole major league, the National League, was being taken over by Irish brawlers such as the crafty John McGraw of the Baltimore Orioles. Thus, ballparks attracted a lower class of fan. In 1901 entrepreneur Ban Johnson founded the rival American League to provide a more honest and gentlemanly version of the game that would appeal to WASP and German-American families. Johnson’s league has remained dominant for most of the last eleven decades.

In contrast, European soccer clubs mostly emerged from their indigenous communities. European soccer teams sponsored local youth leagues that served as feeder systems for talent. American college basketball coaches, though, are lauded not for their training, but for scouring distant slums to recruit genetically gifted one-and-done stars.

And here, during.

And again, during (man with fag is master butcher/griller of the operation).

And again, about to come off…

(They were consumed too quickly for any presentation shots. But then again, life is a series of frustrations, in’nit?)

The next day
was much warmer.
– Elizabeth Bishop

A golden finch is singing rain in notes
That fall in desperate distances of cloud –
The agony of rust that sounds a gate’s
Intransigent articulation. Wood
And field are cropping frozen fog and hold
Their tongues to seek relief from winter’s chafe.
This March is hard and time is growing old
While April strives to dream the fallen leaf.

The snow dispersed beneath a chilling rain
Is pocking furrows, mocking shadows’ claims
To death and night and all that draws a line
In time – what ties to stone our names
And dates – what pulls at earth with rusty cry
And rips the frozen hinges off the sky.

Long awaited (at least by me) - Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J.F. Powers, 1942-1963. 

It’s been edited  by the author’s daughter Katherine A. Powers, and an uncorrected proof copy was sent to me, unsolicited. They must think I’m some sort of Powers scholar – and given half a chance I would be…

Already dipped into the thing – and lots of gems in the introduction by Ms. Powers:

“Well before the publication of his first novel Morte D’Urban in 1962, my father…planed to write a novel about ‘family life,’ an intention that persisted for the rest of his life. … The man falls in love, gets married, has numerous children – but has neither money nor home. He finds no pleasant ease and little of the fellowship of like minds he associated with the literary life [he didn't have Korrektiv] he had thought was to be his own. The novel would be called Flesh, a word infused with Jansenist distaste, conveying a bleak comedy and terrible bathos of high aesthetic and spiritual aspiration in hopeless contest with human needs and material necessity.”

“The letters that make up this story begin with Him at age twenty-five and the acceptance for publication of his first short story. They then leap forward to letters from prison [where Powers, a pacifist, served time as a conscientious objector during WWII] and on through those recording high hopes, great promise, and a passionate courtship and marriage to Betty Wahl. Then comes the black comedy of children, five all told, great poverty, bad luck, and balked creativity. Central to this progression is the matter of where and how to live. Jim’s married life was dominated by the search for ‘suitable accommodations,’ for a house that would reflect and foster the high calling of the artist. In the course of their married life… the couple moved more than twenty times.”

And one more:

“In his letters to his friends…He often adopted a tone of macabre relish for the hopelessness of his situation: the absence of a house, the presence of many children and a desperate wife, the amount of time he had spent on the mechanics of life, the piddling nature of his daily doings, and his longing for and lack of camaraderie.

“‘We have her no lasting home’ was his constant refrain, drawing, with feigned smugness, on Christian teaching… In any case, the phrase always had the torque of a joke, for the Powerses were forever on the move, leaving some houses out of the urge to quit the country (whichever one it happened to be at the time [America or Ireland]), laving other houses because they were taken by eminent domain or sold out from under them. But Jim also meant the statement as a summary of his essential belief: that life on earth doesn’t make sense and that when you understood that, you understood reality. Still, for a person who held that the world is an obstacle-strewn journey toward one’s proper home (heaven), he was more than ordinarily affronted by hardship and adversity, to say nothing of mediocrity and dullness. He was no stoic, and he took it all personally.”

Then Ms. powers quotes one of her father’s 1979 letter to her, who was “then thirty-one and living, as were his other children, far away: ‘You referred to [Powers' son] Boz’s plan for me to make a lot of money so we can move back to Ireland. He may be right. I see it as idealism, but what else would work for our family? A big house not too far from Dublin, [daughter] Jane weaving and dyeing in one room, [son]Hugh philosophizing and botanizing in another, Boz and family in one wing, [daughter] Mary etching in one tower, Katherine reading in another, Mama in the garden, Daddy with The Irish Times and The Daily Telegraph in his study.’

“To which scheme I say to myself now, as I did then: Oh, dear.”

In San Diego, no less.

For the complete skinny, stride on over here: http://todayentertainment.today.com/_news/2013/04/16/17781096-actor-in-infamous-star-wars-scene-has-died?lite

“Mr. Speaker, will the decades-long major national news media cover-up of the brutality—and violence—of abortion methods ever end?

“Will Americans ever be told the horrifying details as to how—and how often—abortionists dismember, decapitate, and chemically poison innocent babies?

“Will Americans ever be informed by a conscientious, unbiased news media that in the past 40 years, over 55 million child victims have been brutally killed by abortion—a staggering loss of children’s lives that equates to the entire population in England? And that many women have been hurt physically, emotionally, psychologically—and according to the Center for Disease Control over 400 women have actually died from legal abortions.

“Will Americans ever be told that of the 55 million children, Planned Parenthood alone claims responsibility for destroying over 6 million babies and that just two weeks ago a Planned Parenthood leader in Florida testified at a legislative hearing on a state initiative to protect born alive infants that even when a child survives an abortion, the decision to assist or kill the born alive infant should be “up to the woman, her family and her physician.” In other words, even if a child intended to be aborted survives the assault, the choice to kill remains—so called after birth abortion. Isn’t that extreme child abuse?

“Murdering newborns in the abortion clinic, it seems to me, is indistinguishable from any other child predator wielding a knife or a gun. Why isn’t that that child seen as a patient in need of medical care, warmth, nutrition and dare I say—love?

“Now another national media cover up! In this case, even when a Jeffrey Dahmer-like murder trial of an abortionist named Kermit Gosnell, who ran the benign-sounding Women’s Medical Society, unfolds in a Philadelphia Courtroom replete with shocking testimony of beheadings, unfathomable abuse, death, and body parts in jars. To this day, the national news media remains uninterested, indifferent—AWOL. Why the censorship? Gosnell’s “house of horrors” trial fails to attract any serious and meaningful national news reporting.

“Dr. Kermit Gosnell is on trial for eight counts of murder. One count is for the death of a woman who died during an abortion at his clinic. Seven counts are for babies who survived their abortion and were born alive but then killed by severing their spinal cords with a pair of scissors.

“In the words of the Grand Jury report: “Gosnell had a simple solution for unwanted babies: he killed them. He didn’t call it that. He called it ‘ensuring fetal demise.’ The way he ensured fetal demise was by sticking scissors in the back of the baby’s neck and cutting the spinal cord. He called that ‘snipping.’ Over the years there were hundreds of ‘snippings.’

“Indeed, the national news media has not only taken a pass and looked the other way, but their stunning indifference has done a grave disservice to Gosnell’s victims—the woman killed, other women injured and children slaughtered by Gosnell. Because of the national media’s indefensible silence—because of their failure to report—other women and children at other abortion mills might be at risk.

“Indeed, the Gosnell Grand Jury Report in January 2011 powerfully noted that an absence of press coverage—and gross negligence by health department personnel in Pennsylvania—enabled Gosnell to show a “contemptuous disregard for the health, safety, and dignity of his patients that continued for 40 years.”

“Some media commenters, however, are beginning to take note of the national news media bias and blackout in the case.

“Yesterday an editorial in the Investors Business Daily titled Newtown In The Clinic: Media Ignore The Gosnell Trial said
‘Media Bias: A basketball coach who shoves and curses at his players merits constant coverage by a media also transfixed by Newtown. But a Philadelphia doctor on trial for murdering a woman and seven babies? It’s ignored.

Those who get their news from the three major networks have probably not heard of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, now on trial in Philadelphia, charged with seven counts of first-degree murder and one count of third-degree murder for killing seven babies who survived abortions and a woman who died after a botched pain-killer injection…

According to the Media Research Center, in one week Rice received 41 minutes, 26 seconds of air time on ABC, CBS and NBC in 36 separate news stories. Gosnell received zero coverage…

If Dr. Gosnell had walked into a nursery and shot seven infants with an AR-15, it would be national news and the subject of presidential hand-wringing.’

“In today’s edition of USA Today, columnist Kirsten Powers writes:

‘Infant beheadings. Severed baby feet in jars. A child screaming after it was delivered alive during an abortion procedure. Haven’t heard about these sickening accusations?

It’s not your fault. Since the murder trial of Pennsylvania abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell began March 18, there has been precious little coverage of the case that should be on every news show and front page.’

“She goes on to point out:” ‘A Lexis-Nexis search shows none of the news shows on the three major national television networks has mentioned the Gosnell trial in the last three months. The exception is when Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan hijacked a segment on Meet the Press.’

“In a letter sent by Media Research Center President Brent Bozell and 20 prominent leaders call on the broadcast networks to stop censoring coverage of the trial, pointing out that as of April 4th, since the trial began ABC, CBS and NBC have given the story zero coverage in their morning and evening news shows.

“Again I ask. When will the media blackout stop? Will America ever be told about the brutality of abortion and the violence that is commonplace inside the abortion industry? Or will the media continue to censor this trial of the century, because it exposes an all too inconvenient truth that not only are unborn children destroyed in these killing centers, but that even babies who survive the abortion can’t escape the deadly hand of the child predator.”

UPDATE: At least one reporter either backpedals into honesty or honestly backpedals:

[Daily Beast reporter Meghan] McArdle discusses a reply from Washington Post reporter Sarah Kliff when she was questioned for not covering the trial by Mollie Hemingway of the GetReligion blog. On Twitter, Kliff said: “I cover policy for the Washington Post, not local crime.”

“I could also offer Kliff’s defense, that this is a local crime,” writes McArdle. “But George Tiller’s murder was also a local crime. There was no ‘national policy issue’ involved: murder is a matter for state law…Nonetheless, lots of national journalists — including Sarah Kliff, for Newsweek — covered the killing and discussed what it meant for abortion provision nationwide.”

Complete story here: http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/pro-choice-reporter-apologizes-for-not-covering-gosnell-calls-it-trial-of-t/

http://news.sky.com/story/1076746/beaver-bites-man-to-death-in-belarus-attack

JOB

Beech and birch extend into ugly candid possum hair,
And elms and maples muster into a passel of woodchuck.

The air waited on first signs of spring, curling up like smoke
Through your lips – petals thin as pencils, yet capable of shape

And form; they’re forced into a smile by a late March sleep
Being much too late for April showers. The ice is glassed

Over, bonding yesterday afternoon’s puddles into a crust,
The gouged march of cattle habitual for bleak pasture;

The frozen prints are filmy, each a black and white fish-eyed fissure
That gazes up from feathery hooks to ultimate grey; outside

We’ve come to test the meadows and taste the weather, greyed
As tombs. Embraced by down and wool, we try hard to ignore

The vestiges of conversational winter, snow that quipped before
In patches defers now to gelid mud. The quiet of the fire

In the parlor stove lives on – but questions hang in the air
Beyond their usefulness – like the organic smell of summer cotton

Released as a felt presence in the room by the heat of an iron.
So thickly dressed, you could be woman or man; though your feet

Are deliberate with feminine pause, your eyes have decided to fight
The urge to ever meet on the issue but maintain the differences

Like valleys that separate the hills with everlasting distances.
With half-hearted barking, geese announce their return, bounding

The fields with pump-handled pinions rising, falling, finding
Their shadows threading like dolphins through a splintered sea.

You look up at them and their shadows across the valley.
Your smile relaxes, warms up, shares the sky and ground with no one.

Your glance takes in the entire landscape without love, but then
You allow that spring may overwhelm us at any moment; I gather

Your silhouette by heart; it is the short memory of ice. The weather
Is turning chalky blue. (The day’s vanishing point held us where we stood.)

A slight breeze stirs the sleeping forest from its impenetrable mood;
The cold air pushes our shadows together. We share the horizon

To search for where a once-familiar tree is a woodpile now forgotten.

http://bishopflores.blogspot.com/2013/03/la-pasion-en-la-traduccion-passion-in.html#comment-form

JOB

“Hello. Since I can’t post, I’ll put this short thing I wrote about heliocentrism under a comment; I had added it under the one below, but would prefer to repeat it here. I’d be grateful for your comments on it, although I realise it’s not directly related to the topic above:

If the earth rotates around its axis at one thousand miles an hour (and at a much faster speed around the sun), then: (i) if the air above it does not move, why wouldn’t this influence the distance/time travelled by aeroplanes – ie if the earth moves, why isn’t this taken into account; (ii) if the air above the earth also moves at the same speed, why don’t, for example, leaves blow in an air current of 1000 miles an hour, whereas they do at a speed of, say, 1020 miles an hour; (iii) if there is a distinction between a moving air above the earth and wind in terms of their effects on moving objects, how can this be explained, rather than asserted. And is not also then unlikely that the earth travels around the sun.

I had wondered if much of cosmology was invented for political reasons: to undermine religion and in order therefore to encourage technological advancement and a change in values, although I had wondered if certain developments, such as plane travel, might even have been held up until the view of the universe had consolidated.”

Of course, Churchill gives away too much in this concern – knowing full well that it is a hot topic among Catholic triddywackers.

Dear Korrektiv Konsumers, I humbly ask that you go forth and buy or steal this book…

And then write all kinds of nice things about it in the reviews… A beer in it for you! OK, fine! The cocktail of your choice and grilled steak!

(But you have to come to Wisconsin to claim them!)

JOB

Because, apparently, all of western Wisconsin is going to be invaded by Little Cat A-Z…but no Voom in sight.

Which means, I’m sorry to say, an excellent opportunity to continue this inane photo series well beyond it’s shelf life.

Now that’s the Garden State I remember…

Because a long time ago, God loved the Republicans; now, if the 2012 election was any indicator, God loves the Democrats and so, naturally, Republicans must also love Democrats… So, I repeat, this is the diminutive mid-Atlantic state once inhabited by the Lenni Lenape which I knew so well in my youth.

Even nature groans to give birth to such an oversized pacakage as Mr. Chris Christie offers to midwife – as NJ now has a place to throw all the good money following this tom-foolery.

Which brings us to the slow browning out of America – and to that end a quick Browning out of Mr. Christopher Christie:

Christie Crashes

The pigs’re on the wing,
And Christie’s on the horn;
The presser’s at seven;
The surrender-flag unfurled;
The buzz has a sting;
The cynic yawns with scorn;
God’s lost in heaven—
All’s left in the world!

Because that’s what we do here at Korrektiv.

Yesterday, in response to Mr. Lickona’s post, there was a comment quoting at length from the Catholic Encyclopedia entry on Pope Gregory VII. In that entry, the following account of the Church’s decadence is included: The tenth century, the saddest, perhaps, in Christian annals, is characterized by the vivid remark of Baronius that Christ was as if asleep in the vessel of the Church.

Now, lo and behold, today the Pope picks up on what obviously became an outrageously viral meme started right here at Korrektiv:

Incidentally, this gets its name from this and is home to this.

You put a mango in a bowl
To give to dawn its rounding shape;
You give the rest a profiled whole
To shed some light on yawning sleep.

Disturbed exactly at the time
I reached for rhythm’s textured tone
And shadowed logic in a rhyme…
And almost touching – vanished, gone.

The mango, though, you gave to me
And sleeping silhouette deferred
Were gift enough to stop the sea –
And break each wave upon a word.

Apparently not.