I tend to think that’s not a typo at the bottom there. It’s its own enemy sometimes; in this case, it’s simply a victim of its own Man Size Pressure Pack.
Archives for March 2017
JOB I ain’t
March 18, 2017 by at 9:09 am
Look, some people write epic, and some people write doggerel, and then there are some people who aren’t even Irish, so what do you know? Anyway, there was a gathering last night, and there was some Mexican whiskey at the gathering, and there was a great deal of singing, and so naturally, I wrote a song. Apologies, of a sort, to the English in the room. Sung, more or less, to the tune of, “Whiskey, You’re the Devil.”
Oh the English kicked our asses
For seven hundred years
But we have fairer lasses
And we have darker beers
So let them have the courthouse
And let them take the square
And we’ll go back to our house
And take some comfort there
Oh, the English fog is yellow
And the English heart is pale
If your friend’s an English fellow
Then your friendship’s sure to fail
So we’ll pay their English taxes
And we’ll speak their English tongue
But when their grip relaxes
Then will Irish songs be sung
Oh if I were born in England
I wouldn’t stay at home
I’d get right out of England
And to Ireland I would roam
So for all the English bastards
I feel pity more than scorn
Who wouldn’t be a bastard
If in England he was born?
Na Muintir: Three Fragments
March 17, 2017 by at 10:17 am
(The Coming of the Gaels)
Let us sing of the coming of the Gaels,
Three tribes like three streams, wandering
Across the wide lands of the East and South,
Across the roaring body of seas, land
Of foreign powers and ways weird to Eire.
From there came the Milesians though last
In order, first in war and rule.
These were met
By bristling Firbolg and mighty Tuatha Da Danaan,
When to these the Milesians beat their path.
All three were kin of Celt’s blood, who before
The singing of songs separated to become
One tribe, they of whom we now sing our tune,
The triple-headed river of wandering men,
Come from the East, the Gaels, warring down
To the peace of a single river’s flow: the Gaels.
First the Firbolg came, and they from Hellas,
Long enslaved but cunning in their escape,
Capturing the ships of their veteran masters,
Outrunning the curses of Manannan MacLir,
They managed a beach head, and thereby good fortune
Until the Fomorians, tribe of rovers,
With a stronghold on Tory Island, waged big war
Coming down like birds of prey, across
The cold grey seas, white-tipped with chill wind,
Come down from the Island of Tory, northwest.
Because of the Firbolgs, the Fomorians would work
A petty worry in the wake of the Tuatha De Danann.
So came next these clever and skillful folk.
Awed by the finery and execution of artful works,
[Read more…]
Redound thee unto mine own personage…
March 14, 2017 by at 9:09 am
I’d Be Happy to Know I Was the Only One Who Missed This…
March 13, 2017 by at 3:53 pm
From FOK Nick Ripatrizone…
In related other belated news, the man behind the swiveling heads and green projectile liquids finds out if he was right all along…
ADDED: Well, now, this is something (else!).
Gerasene ’17: The Kollektiv at Notre Dame
March 7, 2017 by at 9:55 am
[Image: the Mississippi gravesite of Senator LeRoy Percy, Walker Percy’s uncle.]
CONFIRMED: Two [hopefully three] members of the Korrektiv as panelists at this summer’s Trying to Say “God”: Re-enchanting Catholic Literature, June 22-24 at the University of Notre Dame. Rally, Korrektiv, rally!
Consolations
March 4, 2017 by at 10:57 am
(Interview gets going around four minutes in.)
Every now and then, I smile at the thought of Evelyn Waugh’s happy death at the end of an increasingly unhappy life: on Easter Sunday, after attending Mass in the ancient form which he preferred (as he preferred all things that smacked of permanence and eternity), and on the pot. Heaven and earth, the sublime and the ridiculous, rational and animal, the call of supernature and the call of nature – and so on.
Jumping Jupiter! It’s the art of Father Peter Gray!
March 3, 2017 by at 8:17 am
Possible opening shot for Love in the Ruins
March 1, 2017 by at 10:14 pm
Tonight, it struck me that the novel might be filmed in the manner of David Lynch, with an emphasis on the weirdness and horror lurking at the edges of things.
Open on a close shot of Samantha’s deformed face: “The neuroblastoma had pushed one eye out and around the nosebridge so that Samantha looked like a two-eyed Picasso profile.” Her eyes are closed, but it’s only when the camera starts to swing around and pull back that we realize she is in a casket.
The camera completes its swing and comes to rest on Dr. Tom More, who is kneeling at the casket and looking down at his daughter. His expression contains all the complicated emotions of the following passage:
I wonder: did it break my heart when Samantha died? Yes. There was even the knowledge and foreknowledge of it while she still lived, knowledge that while she lived, life still had its same peculiar tentativeness, people living as usual by fits and starts, aiming and missing, while present time went humming, and foreknowledge that the second she died, remorse would come and give past time its bitter specious wholeness. If only— If only we hadn’t been defeated by humdrum humming present time and missed it, missed ourselves, missed everything. I had the foreknowledge while she lived. Still, present, time went humming. Then she died and here came the sweet remorse like a blade between the ribs.
But is there not also a compensation, a secret satisfaction to be taken in her death, a delectation of tragedy, a license for drink, a taste of both for taste’s sake?
It may be true. At least Doris said it was. Doris was a dumbbell but she could read my faults! She said that when I refused to take Samantha to Lourdes. Doris wanted to! Because of the writings of Alexis Carrel and certain experiments by the London Psychical Society, etcetera etcetera. The truth was that Samantha didn’t want to go to Lourdes and I didn’t want to take her. Why not? I don’t know Samantha’s reasons, but I was afraid she might be cured. What then? Suppose you ask God for a miracle and God says yes, very well. How do you live the rest of your life?
Samantha, forgive me. I am sorry you suffered and died, my heart broke, but there have been times when I was not above enjoying it.
Is it possible to live without feasting on death?
More crosses himself, rises, and the camera follows him as he walks down the aisle between the rows of chairs in the funeral parlor. Doris is in the front row. More pauses when he reaches her, his eyes pleading: Why did you insist on the open casket?
Doris senses the unasked question, and retorts, “I want everyone to see what a loving God you’ve got there.”
Defeated, More continues down the aisle and out into the vestibule, where he takes out a flask and knocks back a hefty snort. He closes his eyes. The camera continues out the door to the immaculate exterior of the funeral home. But as it heads for the ground, we see a crack running the concrete walkway — and pushing up through the crack, an ominous sprouting vine.
The First Word on Silence . . .
March 1, 2017 by at 3:42 am
. . . which is to say the novel, Chinmoku, will always belong to Endo. After reading Mark Lickona’s article I had a few questions, so I went back to my well-worn copy of the book and read a couple of paragraphs from an interview with the author in 1967 (the year after Silence was published). The first should seem familiar to readers of Korrektiv—or anybody’s inner existentialist. With a Japanese twist:
For a long time I was attracted to a meaningless nihilism and when I finally came to realize the fearfulness of such a void I was struck once again with the grandeur of the Catholic Faith. This problem of the reconciliation of my Catholicism with my Japanese blood . . . has taught me one thing: that is, that the Japanese must absorb Christianity without the support of a Christian tradition or history or legacy or sensibility.
Say what? “Without the support of a Christian tradition or history …” How is that possible? What does that even mean?
Good thing there’s another paragraph:
But after all it seems to me that Catholicism is not a solo, but a symphony … If I have trust in Catholicism, it is because I find in it much more possibility than in any other religion for presenting the full symphony of humanity. The other religions have almost no fullness; they have but solo parts. Only Catholicism can present the full symphony. And unless there is in that symphony a part that corresponds to Japan’s mud swamp, it cannot be a true religion. What exactly this part is—that is what I want to find out.
I’m really not sure what to make of the first paragraph, so please, if you can, enlighten me with your comments below. But the second paragraph I rather like, and not just because he uses music as a metaphor. What I find stirring is the resolution he exhibits as he looks ahead to the next thirty years of his career. And even more than that, perhaps, is his ready admittance that he isn’t exactly sure what he makes of the predicament in which he finds himself.
And since Scorsese’s version has fallen upon awfully rocky ground in these parts, I’ll provide a link here to a 1971 Japanese version, directed by Masahiro Shinoda from a screenplay by Endo himself with the director. It differs from the novel in several ways, but I won’t give the game away here.
Last of all, here’s a look at the author himself, shilling for something called the “Bungo Mini”. And coffee:
Do fetuses dream of unborn sheep?
*
An interesting and astute piece on all things “Phildickian” over at Chronicles:
But Dick also had a conservative side, represented by his strong (if heterodox) religious devotion, his distrust of large bureaucratic structures, and his longtime anti-abortion stance. In the last decade of his life, as he finally began receiving substantial amounts of money for his writing, Dick donated thousands of dollars to pro-life causes. He also wrote “The Pre-Persons,” a powerful story in which parents can abort any child under 12. Yet both the speech by Dick-the-hippie and the story by Dick-the-conservative are recognizably the work of the same man—both, in fact, were produced during the same period of his life. The first endorses rebellion, no matter how nihilistic, against a soulless apparatus of power; rebellion, at least, is human. And the story denies the government the right to define who is a human being, arguing that this will only produce a totalitarian system akin to the one the juvenile delinquents in the speech are rebelling against. One need not be pro-vandalism—or pro-life, for that matter—to approve of the underlying point.
*Dick and Percy: Separated at birth?(!)