Archives for August 2007

Try the braided garlic loaf. Also, the sandwich loaf. Also, the pastries. Also, everything. The place is run by a guy from my high school class. It’s wonderful.

…a word in defense, even if it is oblique. Alec Guinness, in recounting his conversion to Catholicism in his memoir Blessings in Disguise, tells a story from the days when he was filming The Detective (a film based on Chesterton’s Father Brown stories). Guinness, still in his priestly costume, is walking back to his hotel in France as it gets dark:

“I hadn’t gone far when I heard scampering footsteps and a piping voice calling, ‘Mon pere!’ My hand was seized by a boy of seven or eight, who clutched it tightly, swung it and kept up a non-stop prattle. He was full of excitement, hops, skips and jumps, but never let go of me. I didn’t dare speak in case my excruciating French should scare him. Although I was a total stranger he obviously took me for a priest and so to be trusted”

The boy takes his leave as they pass his home, “and I was left with an odd calm sense of elation. Continuing my walk I reflected that a Church which could inspire such confidence in a child, making its priests, even when unknown, so easily approachable could not be as scheming and creepy as so often made out. I began to shake off my long-taught, long-absorbed prejudices.”

Of course, such a story carries a note of deep sadness today. The scandal has indeed been scandalous. But it is a good story, all the same.

…I may as well include this bit from Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up:

“The easiest way to get a reputation is to outside the fold, shout around for a few years as a violent atheist or a dangerous radical, and then crawl back to the shelter. The fatted calf is killed for Spargo, Papini, Chesterton and Henry Arthur Jones. There is a bigger temporary premium put on losing your nerve in this regard than in any other.” Hoo!

…so I suppose it’s worthwhile to post, after highlighting that bit from Chesterton in my collection of ’20s-’30s Vanity Fair, some word against against the man from the same volume – i.e., from one of his contemporaries. The magazine asked various worthies to name “the ten great writers whom they find most thoroughly boring…we have all heard about the people who don’t know much about art, but know what they like.’ Here we present you with a number of people who know a great deal about art, and who know what they don’t like.”

Christopher Morley guessed – correctly, I think – that the magazine, “in asking this appalling question hopes to be answered, not by a list of such classic bores as Carlyle or John Stuart Mill or Dr. Frank Crane, but by the names of contemporaries. This, obviously, will lead to a rousing hullaballoo and healthy irritation.” (Bonus points for using “hullabaloo.”)

Morley didn’t list Chesterton among his ten bores, but Ernest Boyd did. Here is Boyd’s opening: “One is tempted to begin at the beginning and list all the five-foot bookshelf geniuses, Homer, Virgil, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, and so forth, but here is an opportunity to be indiscreet. So, instead of taking refuge amongst the defenseless dead, I will mention my imperfect sympathies amongst the moderns.”

Chesterton has good company – Boyd goes after Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad, among others. Here he is on G.K.: “Gilbert K. Chesterton, the cheap punster in excelsis, strenuously engaged in persuading clean-limbed Englishmen that there was ever such a place as ‘Merrie England,’ full of beer and Catholicism.” It’s a charge worth answering, I think. Any experts out there willing to take it on?

And before you dismiss Boyd, please note this dismissal of D.H. Lawrence: “the average Briton in the toils of sex, a sad spectacle.”

Apparently, Owen Wilson stopped into a Catholic church before bottoming out. The post title is taken from Us Weekly’s account of the visit. (Not that I make a habit of visiting Us Weekly, mind you…)

Technical difficulties with Ye Olde Internet Connection. Back tomorrow, hopefully.

Rome continues its drive to become the most religious show on television (or at least, on DVD – season two is finally out). [SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT.] Vorenus curses his children to Hades, and seconds later, they are kidnapped and sold into slavery. Later, Vorenus blasphemes the gods for the sake of worldly influence, and within weeks, all around him is war and terrible solitude. Later still, his friend Pullo, who is genuinely (if simply) pious, says the gods are tricking him, leading him back to Rome to see Vorenus when Vorenus isn’t there. But who IS there? A woman who tells him that Vorenus’ children are not dead, but enslaved – so there is hope for the despairing Vorenus. Servilla is captured by Atia while she is praying to a Mother Goddess. Atia tortures Servilla and promises to kill her, but throughout, Servilla continues to pray. And eventually, she is delivered. The list goes on. There are varying attitudes toward religion – some see it as a tool, some see it as nonsense, some see it as reality. It’s complicated, and it’s interesting, and it comes off as a perfectly natural part of life, not some freakish add-on. I’m a big fan.