Exchange.

Me, 11:20 p.m. on Good Friday: I could use a drink, but the fast is on.

The Wife: You could wait 40 minutes.

Me: But I’m pretty tired.

The Wife: Me too.

Me: I’ll just wait and have a drink when I get up, then.

The Wife: Sounds good.

One.

The Harrowing of Hell

Teachout!

Reviewing T.S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party for the WSJ, he delivers an opening that should thrill any artist who attempts any work that includes the exceedingly common yet somehow exotic human trait of religiosity:

“If you’re willing to suspend religious disbelief and give Old Possum a chance to do his stuff, then I suspect you’ll be transfixed by the stealthy skill with which he goes about the challenging task of making sainthood comprehensible to a secular audience”

“If you’re willing to suspend religious disbelief.” Fabulous.

Lenten Songbook

Innocence Mission, “Every Hour Here”

Yeah, sappy. Sue me. G gave me the album back in college, probably because he knew I liked Cocteau Twins.

I like the line:

I wave up to you on the cross
Am I to come upon you suddenly like this forever?

Happy Good Friday!

Aphorism

One of the most profound measures of a man is how he treats those whose views or behavior he finds abhorrent.

Progress.

First Son: “Well Dad, you were right. Alvin & The Chipmunks: The Squeakquel was crap.”

Dad: “Thank you, son.”

I mean, it’s not quite on a par with his comment after seeing the new Alice in Wonderland: “I mean, the world of Alice in Wonderland is really topsy-turvy, and they tried to impose this really dramatic narrative over it, and to do that right takes incredible balance. And they just didn’t have it.”

But I’ll take it.

Wow.

“But, in fact, McDonough was sacked because of his refusal to do some heated love scenes with babelicious star (and Botox pitchwoman) Virginia Madsen. The reason? He’s a family man and a Catholic, and he’s always made it clear that he won’t do sex scenes. And ABC knew that.”

Today in Porn, Katy Perry Edition

“Hi! I’m pop star Katy Perry! You know: ‘I Kissed A Girl,’ ‘Hot n Cold,’ ‘Waking up in Vegas’? Anyway, I was a presenter at the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards the other night, and I got slimed! And I cannot believe that some people on the Internet were suggesting that wearing a stripper wig and a skin-tight vinyl dress while getting my face sprayed with goo was somehow sexually suggestive? I mean, this is a kid’s show we’re talking about!

I mean, if I wanted to do something sexually suggestive, it’d be more like this, you know? My career thus far hasn’t exactly been built on subtlety.”

Lesson: If you can’t be a Catholic school-girl, a Pastor’s Daughter may be the next best thing!

Wanna Be The Biggest Pop Star in the World? Go to Catholic School!

“A couple times, she came to the studio in sweatpants, and I said, ‘Really, Stef?’ ” says Fusari. “ ‘What if I had Clive Davis in here today? I should call the session right now. Prince doesn’t pick up ice cream at the 7-Eleven looking like Chris Rock. You’re an artist now. You can’t turn this on and off.’ ”

The problem was that she didn’t know how to turn it on: Though she wanted to be a star, she didn’t have a clear idea of what a star was, or where the main currents in pop culture were flowing. It was at this point that she began her serious study. Gaga picked up a biography of Prince, started shopping at American Apparel, and became entranced by aughties New Age bible The Secret, according to friends. As a Catholic-school girl, she interpreted Fusari’s remarks as a signal to cut her skirts shorter and make them tighter, until one day they totally disappeared: All that was left were undies, sometimes with tights underneath.

You stay classy, San Diego.

Garage window and cardboard, 2010. Gotta keep the draft off the chicks.

Benedictus

My Magnificat includes the Mass readings for the day. Today’s Gospel includes Christ’s promise to Peter that Peter will deny Christ three times – a promise made in response to Peter’s declaration that he will lay down his life for Christ. The book also includes this from Pope Benedict XVI: “We have grown accustomed to make a clear distinction between Peter the rock and Peter the denier of Christ – the denier of Christ: that is Peter as he was before Easter; the rock: that is Peter as he was after Pentecost, the Peter of whom we have constructed a singularly idealistic image. But, in reality, he was at both times both of these…Has it not been thus throughout the history of the Church that the Pope, the successor of Peter, has been at once Petra and Skandalon – both the rock of God and a stumbling-block? In fact, the faithful will always have to reckon with this paradox of divine dispensation that shames their pride again and again.”

Fantastic?

Oof. My man at the Reader nailed it:

“Though the droll result has its charms… it’s not so much for children as a group or adults as a group as it is specifically for devotees of Anderson.”

As in, people who never get tired of father issues. (And I say this as someone who admired The Royal Tenenbaums.) Thanks, but I really didn’t need a film to introduce my children to the idea that dads would rather be doing something else (i.e., besides being dads), if only their wives would stop asking them to make impossible promises (i.e., I will sacrifice my own interests for the sake of my family). Or the idea that dads really value sons only insofar as those sons are extensions/replications of themselves. Basically, the idea that dads do not really love their kids for the kids’ own sakes, and that it screws sons up.

But, you say, Mr. Fox tells his son Ash that he was glad that Mrs. Fox had him. Yeah, and even my 12 year old saw through it. “It had no emotional affect,” he said afterwards. Dad only got really excited when it turned out his son was an athlete, after all.

Happy Feast of the Annunciation!

‘Twas also, of course, The Wife’s birthday. Above is the image of the Annunciation that First Daughter drew for her mother’s birthday card. Especially sweet was the image of the newly conceived Christ in Mary’s womb:

We had a party. People who were Not The Wife staffed the kitchen. Good times.

Found on my hard drive.

I’ve been down this rhetorical road sweetie. I know all the arguments, all the counterarguments. And I know the stalemate where it always ends.

You haven’t been down it with me.

Tell me that’s not a hand.

Tell me that’s not a widow. Tell me that’s not a burned child.

The people have spoken.

“No,” said the people.

Travel story.

Someday, I’d love to tell the whole story of my New Orleans trip. A sample of the goodness:

As we strolled away from two tiny houses that housed the Maple Leaf bookstore and its signed fourth-printings of John Kennedy Toole’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, Father Samway launched into a story about Mrs. Toole, who had so famously imposed upon Walker Percy to read the manuscript written by her son. “Mrs. Toole used to have these signing parties.” (This was after Toole’s suicide, and Samway told another, less amusing story about that…) “She would wear her best pink chiffon, and she would always have a piano, and she would sing. She was an elocutionist. So she was having one of these parties at Maple Leaf, and Walker was sitting out in the courtyard, and at one point she stopped and said, ‘Dr. Percy, you’re not listening.’ Then she addressed everyone there. ‘As you know, Dr. Percy was instrumental in the discovery of my son, the genius’ – she always referred to him that way, as if ‘the genius’ was the last part of his name. So then she said, ‘I will now sing Dr. Percy’s favorite song.’ Walker was amazed. He turned to me and said, ‘I can’t wait to find out what my favorite song is.’ And do you know what she sang? Zip-a-dee-doo-dah.”

How utterly perfect. The man who wrote The Moviegoer, who laid a stethoscope on the sagging chest of the South and sought to untangle the symptoms of its systemic race troubles (and the the patient’s attendant compensations), now being linked up with the theme song from a Disney movie, the one Disney movie that, thanks to its racial hamhandedness, has never been released on DVD. We really don’t get to write our own epitaphs.

And speaking of epitaphs: when, the next morning, after Lauds in the St. Joseph’s Abbey church and a stroll into the recesses of the Abbey cemetery, we found ourselves standing before Percy’s leaf-strewn grave under a clean blue sky – well, how could we not follow Potter’s inspired suggestion that we sing Dr. Percy’s favorite song? ‘Round and ’round we marched, the three of us, jazz-hands waving, voices ringing: “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay/ My oh my, what a wonderful day…” All the way through, and then down on one knee for the final note, like a short-staffed barbershop quartet. Silly, sure, but not, I think, unfitting. We were paying homage to a satirist, the man who gave us Father Kev Kevin at the Love Clinic, reading Commonweal as he sat at his console of vaginal indicators. Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, indeed.

And then there were three.

A good deal in life, it seems to me of late, depends on paying attention to things glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, to things that seem a touch off or out of place, to things that trigger a momentary flutter in the gut. The things that one is tempted to gloss over. Silly, obvious case in point: yesterday, I noticed that the back gate to our yard was open. It’s not like it’s ever locked or anything, but neither is it ever used. Why was it open? More importantly, why didn’t I shut it? If I had, I might have stymied whatever it was that came into our yard last night and slaughtered one of our chickens.