
So. What’s everybody working on?
So. What’s everybody working on?
…is an actual line of dialogue from Altered Carbon, Netflix’s dense and gorgeous sci-fi series about life after death has been digitally defeated. Consciousness has been codified, so you can get “spun up” into a new bodily “sleeve” for all eternity — provided you have the means. But wouldn’t you know it, there’s this weird bunch of religious zealots who object — who make noises about soul and body having more to do with each other than ghost and machine, who think it devilish to deny death and what comes after. Who make noises about human dignity. Remarkable.
It’s chock full of sex and violence, and the dialogue isn’t always the strongest, and the acting isn’t always spot-on. But there’s a lot there, and I’m kinda fascinated. It’d be fun to see some smart Catholic critic dig into it. Heh.
So The Shape of Water (my review, for what it’s worth, is here) got a whole bunch of Oscar nominations. I’m gonna use that as my spur for writing Volume Two of Lives of Famous Catholics. See if I can get it done in time for the ceremony in early March. No title yet, but my subject is director Guillermo Del Toro. I know, I know — another film director? But I can’t help myself. For what it’s worth, I still hope to finish Gaga Confidential, perhaps pegged to the release of A Star is Born later this year. I have plans for the other four entries that will make up the eventual seven-story book, but there’s no sense in getting ahead of myself. Let’s see if I can do one.
I almost think the opening scene of Nocturnal Animals is there to scare the moralists away via aesthetic assault. (It also serves a narrative/thematic function, sure, but…) Because after that, it plays out with the blunt trauma moral force of a Flannery O’Connor story, only without the promise of grace. Maybe it was the tequila watching, but I liked it a lot.
An interesting and astute piece on all things “Phildickian” over at Chronicles:
*Dick and Percy: Separated at birth?(!)
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!).
We’ve got another novel for you to write…
Sure, they’re not overturning cars yet – but just you wait until they get their rosaries in women’s ovaries. Then it will be all over!
Full story about these anti-women, anti-choice terrorists here.
(And watch that sassy Barbara O’Brien lassie in particular (yeah right – that’s her real name!) – she’s probably hiding a pressure cooker bomb behind that placard she’s holding – and getting ready to set fire to cop cars to boot!)
…one of these things/ doesn’t belong…
WARNING: Graphic, unpleasant images after the jump…
Happy they who…having rested in peace, stretch out their hands to Him, who must lift them up, and make them stand upright and firm in the porches of the holy Jerusalem! There pride can no longer assail them nor cast them down; and yet they weep, not to see all those perishable things swept away by the torrents, but at the remembrance of their loved country, the heavenly Jerusalem, which they remember without ceasing during their prolonged exile. – Pascal, Pensees 458
We too were Jews, we here in Bethlehem
When Herod’s men with steel and daggered eyes
Believed in everything they saw. Each hem
And tunic sleeve, red as winter sunrise,
Repeated endlessly upon the flat
And edge of sword’s empirical emprise—
Potential trickles like driblets of fat
And greasy flame reshapes dispatching arms
That thread entwined through meat and sticky guts,
And turn the muscle’s issue into worms.
We too, subjects of a place-keeping pawn,
Were chosen for this cradled land. No storms
Could lull our cries, no Babylon could croon
Our lullabies so well…. Oh, Jerusalem,
Why could no angel stop your hand again?
Not living, you survived our Bethlehem—
Our braziers warmed your hypotheticals:
We come as one and yet alone, Shalom!
We come, shalom! assuming you—who else?—
Would tell us why the star that’s out of place
Now leads us to this place where power dwells….
Our mothers—bleeding milk and motherless—
Behold the shattered flesh. These bodies, curled
As severed tongues upon the ground, confess
Such tiny holocausts, such piercing cold.
Lena Dunham on line one, Mr. Pinfold…
IRL she’s a generation’s gutsy, ambitious voice, author, showrunner, and star of the HBO hit Girls. But on TV and the web she becomes “a girl who careens between wisdom and ignorance,” a girl whose delusions have brought her here, to the shadowy realm of Decreased Stigma…
“What I think is incredibly interesting is how everyone kind of evens out together at six months to a year,” said Katie Watson, a bioethicist at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study. “What this study tells us about is resilience and people making the best of their circumstances and moving on,” she said. “What’s sort of a revelation is the ordinariness of it.”
When children kill we wring our hands and cry –
“The kingdom’s here and now and Christ is not
The crucified!” Confused, we butterfly
Our judgment, dissect humanity, gut
The soul and pick apart the truth. We love
Our sins so much we give them tongue to speak….
So heaven’s here and cold as stone above –
While hell’s beneath us. Spatchcock
The conscience, too, o modern primitive!
The temple’s vatic whisper will indict
Though pills become our lusty palliative
And love of death becomes our civil right.
We pay our tongues to serve the talk of peace –
We kill our kids so they can take our place.
Six-week old fetus. Source.
From “The Abortion Ministry of Dr. Willie Parker” in Esquire:
Now we arrive at the heart of the process, the focus of so much controversy and rage. In the surgical room, Dr. Parker softens each woman’s cervix and uses a vacuum extractor to remove her pregnancy. The entire process takes five minutes. After each procedure, he carries the large glass vacuum bottle into an adjoining room. There he pours the fetal tissue from the bottle into an ordinary kitchen strainer and runs tap water over it, then empties the strainer into a clear Pyrex dish and examines the tissue on a light table.
Bending over the glass dish, he stares with the blank expression of a scientist at work. Come closer, he says. Have a look. These are blood clots and this is the decidual tissue, the stuff that looks like feathery coral. That supports the embryo, sloughing off monthly if a pregnancy doesn’t develop.
This one is six weeks. It’s just lumps of red tissue floating in water.
When the triplets arrive, he points out one sac, two sacs, three sacs.
But then he brings in one that’s nine weeks and there’s a fetus. He points out the scattered parts. “There’s the skull, what is going to be the fetal skull. And there are the eye sockets.”
Floating near the top of the dish are two tiny arms with two tiny hands.
Parker continues to examine the tissue. He points to a black spot the size of a pencil tip. “That’s an eye.”
…
Very few outsiders are invited into this room, and rare is the doctor who would show this to a reporter. But today he made a conscious decision not to hide the truth. “At some point, we have to trust that people can deal with the reality of what this is,” he says. “And keeping it hidden only enhances the stigma.”
Growing reflective, he continues to study the parts. “The reality is we’ve disrupted a life process. There are recognizable fetal parts, right? The capacity for this development is always there. After five weeks, you just have the sac. At six weeks, you have a fetal pole with cardiac activity. At seven to eight weeks, it’s just a larger fetal pole. By nine, it’s differentiated.”
But here’s the vital question: Is it a person? Not by the standards of the law, he says. Is it viable outside the womb? It is not. So this piece of life—and remember, sperm is alive, eggs are alive, it’s all life—is still totally dependent on a woman. And that dependence puts it in the domain of her choice. “That’s what I embrace,” he says.
But it’s hard not to look at those tiny fingers, no bigger than the tip of a toothpick.
Does that ever disturb him?
“When I recognize whole fetal parts? No. Because I’m not deluded about what this whole process is.”
And what does examining this tissue tell him? Does this satisfy another state regulation?
“It tells me her uterus is empty and she is no longer pregnant.”
With that, Dr. Parker goes back into the operating room to give the woman who can now become an Air Force officer the sad good news.
A nod to Kierkegaard and Walker Percy: existentialist tomfoolery, political satire, literary homage, word mongering, a year-round summer reading club, Dylanesque music bits, apocalyptic marianism, poetry, fiction, meta-porn, a prisoner work-release program.
Søren Kierkegaard
Walker Percy
Bob Dylan
Literature & History
Letters from an American
Beau of the Fifth Column
This American Life
The Writer’s Almanac
San Diego Reader
The Stranger
The Inlander
Adoremus
Charlotte was Both
The Onion
From Empty Hands
Ellen Finnigan
America
Commonweal
First Things
National Review
The New Republic
All Manner of Thing
Gerasene Writers Conference
Scrutinies
DarwinCatholic
Catholic and Enjoying It
Bad Catholic
Universalis
Is My Phylactery Showing?
Quotidian Quintilian
En pocas palabras
William Wilson, Guitarist Extraordinaire
Signposts in a Strange Land
Ben Hatke
Daniel Mitsui
Dappled Things
The Fine Delight
Gene Luen Yang
Wiseblood Books
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“And the Darkness Did Not Comprehend It”
An early December story in The Hollywood Reporter recounts the first time that Hollywood actress Meryl Streep and legendary director Steven Spielberg met. “Most of the time,” Streep recalled in the December 5 story by Peter Galloway, she and Spielberg “talked about how his property was haunted and did I know anybody who did exorcisms? And of course, I did. I got him a priest.”
This comment from a member of the Hollywood community might come as a surprise to some people. After all, Streep works for the same business that produced a legion of movies about the devil—from Rosemary’s Baby to The Omen to The Exorcist—all in one way giving the devil more than his due by sensationalizing evil. Sure, images of devil and hellfire help maximize ticket sales—but do people in Hollywood actually believe all this Satan stuff?
While it’s not clear from The Hollywood Reporter story whether the famed director rid his house of the suspected evil, it is clear that even those who make fantasies for a living accept that the devil is real and that when he shows up on its doorstep, even the world of make-believe knows there’s only one place to turn: the Catholic Church.
Perhaps implicit in Streep’s recommendation to Spielberg is an understanding that believer and non-believer alike acknowledge, grudgingly or not—that the Catholic Church alone offers a direct, no-nonsense and effective solution to demonic affliction…
READ THE REST HERE