“Time for your aurul scrubbing, Ellen!”

Play this real loud -  and with a glass of wine/whisky/gin already in you and another on the way let the sound flood you like sunshine through a large picture window in an Italian villa. If this doesn’t get your head right, nothing will.

p.s. Can you do that in high heels?

Doubt as an Avenue of Communication

I want to hang onto this comment of Angelico’s and the passage he quoted from Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity, because I see it as key, possibly, to the unique character of Korrektiv. I re-quote it here as a placemarker for further consideration.

No one can lay God and his Kingdom on the table before another man; even the believer cannot do it for himself. But however strongly unbelief may feel justified thereby, it cannot forget the eerie feeling induced by the words ‘Yet perhaps it is true.’ That ‘perhaps’ is the unavoidable temptation it cannot elude, the temptation in which it, too, in the very act of rejection, has to experience the unrejectability of belief. In other words, both the believer and the unbeliever share, each in his own way, doubt and belief, if they do not hide from themselves and from the truth of their being. Neither can quite escape either doubt or belief; for the one, faith is present against doubt; for the other, through doubt and in the form of doubt. It is the basic pattern of man’s destiny only to be allowed to find the finality of his existence in this unceasing rivalry between doubt and belief, temptation and certainty. Perhaps in precisely this way doubt, which saves both sides from being shut up in their own worlds, could become the avenue of communication.

Could this serve as a formative piece of that Korrektiv Press manifesto or mission statement we’ve been casting about for? The fine print at the bottom of that gravestone?

Surfing with Mel: Getting meta for the opening scene, losing my job, etc.

The opening shot is straight out of the comments, as is the notion of making a film (thanks, Not-Ted).

Dominican haiku

For IC and Imelda Jean, O.P.

Deep in forest of
High shelves, ripe with old knowledge –
Yellowed leaves’ perfume.

Up from the Comments

Though I’m grateful to post at Korrektiv,
A Dominican must be objektiv:
Any club that lets in
Old Angelico Nguyen
(Even short-term) ain’t all that selektiv.

From Love in the Ruins

Angelico’s recollection of Rosebud’s convoluted anus in the combox for JOB’s convoluted post below brought to mind other great ani loci in Percy’s oeuvre, including this passage from Love in the Ruins:

Like saints of old, Dusty spends himself tirelessly for other men, not for love, he would surely say, or even for money, for he has no use for it, but because people need him and call him and what else would he do with himself? His waking hours are spent in a dream of work, nodding, smiling, groping for you, not really listening. Instead, his big freckled hands feel you like a blind man’s. He’s conservative and patriotic too, but in the same buzzing, tune-humming way. His office is stacked with pamphlets of the Liberty Lobby. In you come with a large bowel complaint, over you go upside down on the rack, in goes the scope, ech! and Dusty humming away somewhere above. “Hm, a diverticulum opening here. The real enemy is within, don’t you think?” Within me or the U.S.A., you are wondering, gazing at the floor three inches from your nose, and in goes the long scope. “You know as well as I do who’s causing the real trouble, don’t you?” “Do you mean—” “I mean the Lefts and Commonists, right?” “Yes, but on the other hand—” In goes the scope the full twenty-six inches up to your spleen. “Oof, yessir!”

And of course, having first read Love in the Ruins in the 80s, I couldn’t read this without conjuring up this guy … for all I know, his son:

“It’s gone be shameful!”

Denny’s Revisited

Down the page a bit, I posed the following to guest blogger Cubeland Mystic:

“If Mary Karr showed up at your cave in sack cloth and ashes and asking for a word, what would you say to her?”

To which the Mystic replied:

“In the cave absolutely nothing. The cave ain’t for talking. The cave is for listening. In the Denny’s, I would encourage her to user her fiction writing talents to bring hope to people.”

In the Denny’s, yes!

Then, on my way to work this morning, I heard a story about a guy, possibly a friend of JOB’s, who walked into a Denny’s in Madison on Fat Tuesday and cooked himself up a burger.

But the story within the story is about writing:

DeSpain, a public information officer for the department — and former CBS affiliate employee — writes up many of the most important police reports each day. Sometimes, he said, he can’t help but stray from the often tame and boring narrative style of police reports.

“This one kind of wrote itself,” he told The Huffington Post. “Most days I’m knee-deep in stuff that’s not so humorous. But occasionally we’ll get one like this.

So my question is: What would you say to this guy — in Denny’s — Cubeland Mystic?

For Betty Duffy

Noel Coward, 1954.  Those days will never be long past.

 

Up from Spamments

Invective: Spam*

“Wow gold cheapest wow power leveling under the internet’s best site!”
-spam message

…duas tantum res anxius optat,
Spamem et circenses.
Juvenal

Each wonderful wizard of oz. and lb. lives to be wow
Of the moment, hawking reality paltry as fool’s to real gold.
The low roads go yellow bric by yellow brac, so the cheapest
Way to diffuse the truth is first to buy up stock in this wow power
And then dismantle common sense, thereby utterly leveling
All true distinctions with distortion and burying them under
Circus clichés that mold our daily bread – the internet’s best
Illusion: fishing for infinite variety from a single site.

*I am to swearing I never not making these up things out of scratches. I’ve had this one in my bunker mental for a good good awhile – I think I may be have even more posted it to Body of God at one timely. But I thinking it to have been be a worthy follow up sniffs good to Mr. Potterman’s posted it.

 

Some say the world