I
I have sent for thee, holy friar
But ‘twas not with the drunken hope,
Which is but agony of desire
To shun the fate, with which to cope
Is more than crime may dare to dream,
That I have call’d thee at this hour:
Such father is not my theme —
Nor am I mad, to deem that power
Of earth may shrive me of the sin
Unearthly pride hath revell’d in —
I would not call thee fool, old man,
But hope is not a gift of thine;
If I can hope (O God! I can)
It falls from an eternal shrine.
- from “Tamerlane” by “A Bostonian” (Edgar Allan Poe)
Tamerlan(e)
April 19, 2013 by at 8:18 am
The Colbert Corrective
February 13, 2013 by at 10:30 pm
Bad Catholic posted this to his Facebook page. My favorite comment on the post comes from Joe Gehret, who muses … “That awkward moment when a satirist in full character puts the theological smackdown on a heretic…”
P.S. BC says he’s working on an abstract to submit to the Walker Percy people. Who else is in?
If you miss Seinfeld
January 17, 2013 by at 1:19 am
Or if you’re tired of watching Kramer shave with butter or Elaine selling Muffin Tops, the sitcom of all sitcoms has been resurrected as a Twitter account. All new episodes @SeinfeldToday
Shelly’s Catholic
December 25, 2012 by at 4:44 pm
Northern Exposure: Holling sings Ave Maria to Shelly on Christmas Eve.
Canticle: A Lamentation of Lamentations
May 31, 2012 by at 9:50 pm
-
for Jonathan Potter
Telling it ruins it.- Walker Percy
If time’s axes could be measured by x’s and y’s,
Weightlessness would hit the moon and comes up short
As typical astronauts would goof on graffiti
That beats them to the punch – “Clapton is God,”
The lunar lithograph exclaims. The pretensions
Are less than literary and more than time allows.
This message from the stars came back as reverb,
A name renamed, distortion, a bending of chords….
And
The same for seeing Israel dimly touching goatskin
On a TV talk show – “That’s Esau, or my name’s not Ishack!”
He touches his nose and suddenly all of Egypt knows
The shivering of naked bodies, all twisted by weird news –
Assemble on a hardwood bench before a swimming pool,
Olympic-sized, its water cold with catharsis. A sauna
Awaits an answer, scalding hot with cleansing steam.
The swimming instructor presumes to know their ἕποι
And
Let’s count them off – a madwoman who bent herself
Into a chimney and another into a ventilation shaft:
Both waited to die, discovering what we’ll never find out
Unless we interpret their deaths as more akin to life;
A man who chewed away at the face of another man,
Strong with the urge to prove that human flesh must eat,
Faceless, drug out from shadows, out into light,
Miami’s hot sun, in plain view, faceless, nothing new….
And
A boy who burnt his parish church down to see Christ
The night He was born. His innocent match lights the hay,
The statues, altar, body, blood, soul and divinity.
Still another boy who greeted mother as a corpse
Every day for seven weeks after school, alone, together,
And not knowing death, only sleep and love;
He took direction from her ghost until the matrix
Decided enough was enough; then there was the last,
And
So lost in numbers among forceps and lawful blood,
The airlock of bickering rhetoric, a silent scream,
This one, he or she, counts, observable, if only for Rachel.
Remember Rachel? “Who is Rachel? What is she?”
And
My guitar gently weeps.
House
May 23, 2012 by at 1:21 pm
Lord help me, I never could stand this show. But The Wife loved it. Anyway, now it’s over. Still, there will never be a finale as awful as Lost‘s. I’m looking at you, Potter.
Today in Porn: Girls Edition
So Terry Gross interviewed Lena Dunham, the youthful creator/writer/star of the girls-in-the-city HBO show Girls. Most of the attention has been on her response to questions about the show’s lack of diversity. But whaddya know, they also chatted about boys who get their sexual education from pornography.
GROSS: So do you get a sense that a lot of guys your age have learned about sex through porn sites and have these unrealistic and sometimes ludicrous ideas of what sex is like or what a girl would like?
DUNHAM: I do get that sense. I get the sense that there’s a new kind of learned behavior. I had a conversation with Frank Bruni about this for The New York Times where he was asking me yeah, about the porn question it and I told that there’s certain things that you’ll experience when, you know, not like I want to make it sound like I’m all over town, you know, testing different guys’ sexual prowesses. But in my own personal limited sexual experience I’ve found that there are guys doing things where you go there’s no way that that is your own personal instinct. You learned that from somewhere and it wasn’t, you know, a birds and bees conversation with your mom and it also wasn’t taught to you by a high school girl you met in Michigan. Like that you’re your – that is something that you have, you know, learned through osmosis culturally and now A, want to try yourself, or even more insidiously, think that I will like. And I think that young people are really scared to tell each other what they actually want.
It’s funny. I mean not to get too personal but I just found a diary that I kept in college. I’ve been an intermittent diary keeper always, never a faithful one. And there’s some guy had done something. It wasn’t anything, you know, to dramatic, like he’d just been I think sort of we kissed in college and he’d been sort of rough with me and I asked him if he always acted that way. And he said no, I don’t. But with you I do because it’s clearly what you want.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
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