Paulus Torchus

Paul Mathers on Tending

2012-02-11T22:22:00.000-08:00

I was surprisingly encouraged to find so many people in the gardening store today. There is a local hardware store in sight from our front porch and, the other day, their windows were painted with large letters reading "It's Time To Plant." Which, upon noticing its appearance, I thought, "By golly, so it is."

It's been a splendidly mild winter in our area. I've been tanning a great deal so far this February. I fear that often portends a remarkably cruel summer, specifically the likelihood of massive wildfires. However, I feel fairly certain in assuming that there shan't be another frost this year.

Upon first glance, one might think the picture above a horrible admission of the state of a portion of my backyard. It is an area of our yard which was, at one point, the place where I drug a huge limb that fell from one of our trees during a dry spell. It then sort of became the catch-all for yard waste that was waiting for room in the trash bin. Little by little I would hack away at branches and use them to fill the trash container at the end of the trash week. Nature always finds a way and grass strangled down the odd stray branch until we had a spot where our Fraggles would go for advice.

I admit this for two reasons. First of all, though this be madness, yet there is method in't. I knew as I saw a small wild patch creeping in that the leaves from the branches and the moisture enclosing grass shell would create soil rich beyond our wildest dreams. Second, as of writing this, I have almost cleared the area. The soil, indeed, is extremely rich. It is nearly ready for us to plant.

Off we went to the gardening center. We plan on making a raised bed next year. This year Laurie wisely, I think, suggested that we reign in our plans to what is practically do-able in the next week or two, lest we end up doing nothing (Laurie understands my Ent-like tendency to take on projects that will take me a decade or so to complete. I do, usually, complete them, but it does indicate the handicap of a hopelessly archaic internal clock.)

I do not recall a time in my life without a garden and should not like to ever have such a period. During the "apartment years," it was more often than not confined to small boxes on the windowsill. A garden is a hopeful act. The cultivation of flora speaks of one's belief in quiet, peaceful, seemingly inconsequential acts of good can overcome the world's flood of evil in tiny increments, like throwing so many pebbles in a lake. It is the fulfillment of what, in the Judeo-Christian worldview, is the actual "world's oldest profession."

I have a strong inclination towards adjusting my vision to only notice the shadows in life. I rage against the pessimism that is my birthright. Withnail is the narrator of my internal monologue. Gardening is one of the most efficacious therapies for my manifold neuroses that I have ever undertaken.

A garden is a thing of great beauty, producing beauty, life, and that which can sustain life and beauty. It is also a fragile thing. Existence and a universe ruled by entropy constantly try to get their hands around its throat. In our own little corner, I consider the usual elements of harsh summers and insects when planning a garden. I also take into account our yard unfenced in our perennially impecunious state: the rogue dogs that wander our streets, the racoons, the fact that on my block it's a fairly safe bet that there is methamphetamine somewhere within a stone's throw of my home at any given time and that indigents are more than likely to walk off with anything of value left outside. We have had our tires slashed for no good reason at all and the "territorial peeing" variety of graffiti appears on walls and fences with alarming regularity.

There is a faction within the nascent Occupy movement which has taken to guerrilla gardening. The idea, if I understand it correctly, is to reclaim some of the common, public spaces as a force for good (similar to some of the higher philosophy behind the more elevated manifestations of "Street Art," but, perhaps, with more arguably productive results.) They simply go to parks and set up gardens with signs that the produce thereof belongs to the people, including harvesting instructions. I find small actions like this to be moments where I have hope for the future of humankind. Rare, fleeting hope.

When we moved into the house, Laurie had planned to have "an old lady garden" which, to some extent, we acheived around the perimeter of the house proper with geraniums and hydrangeas. Today, we bought tarragon seeds, beets, lettuce, and cilantro. We have canary melon seeds and pepper seeds which we've saved. I have a fuchsia plant that I have nursed through the winter. My grandmother had a huge fuchsia bush next to her home (still does actually) and I have always wanted to have fuchsia in my home. We have a grapevine which grows grapes until they are just about ready for human consumption at which point the blue jays come and eat them. We have jasmine and lavender and some bulbs by our fence that came with the house (pink naked ladies and paperwhites I think.) This year I am insisting on rose bushes. There should always be roses.

A phrase which I say often in conversation is: "The world can be whatever we choose to make it... and THIS is what we've made it?!!?"

All of which is why I think when my life is over, one of the nouns I would like to have connected to what I did with my time on Earth would be "Gardener."

The Falstaff Coat of Arms

2012-02-07T21:48:00.000-08:00

Laurie and I have declared a few nights a week our "project night." They are usually Tuesdays and sometimes Thursdays as well. It is a night in which we do not watch movies or sit around refreshing Facebook after work but, instead, work on projects. Sometimes it is as practical as moving furniture and laying our floor. Sometimes our projects are more along the art project line.

The other night we watched Verdi's opera Falstaff (a Royal Opera House production from the early 1980s with Renato Bruson in the title role.) The action is loosely based on Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor. There was the scene in which Falstaff finally gets alone with Mistress Ford and he said/sang:

"T'immagino fregiatadel mio stemma,
Mostrar fragemma e gemma
La pompa deltuo sen."

Which is to say that he was imagining his own coat of arms somewhere in the general vicinity of her décolletage.

Which led me to think, "I wonder what Falstaff's coat of arms looks like."

Which led me to think, "I should design a coat of arms for Falstaff!"

What I've done above is to suggest a few elements of Falstaff while hopefully preserving the spirit of a coat of arms. There is a stag which, of course, suggests the more libidinous side of his character. The horns, of course, remind us of the cuckold motif in The Merry Wives as well as Herne, the Hunter. On his antlers, of course, is a bunch of grapes, which should be fairly self-explanatory. The rearing up before the crown is intended to suggest both knighthood and aspirations toward royal favor (as seen in Henry IV.)

The inscription at the bottom is Latin for Falstaff's well known and probably most oft quoted line "The better part of valor is discretion." His turn of phrase is a defense of cowardice.

This is what I do for fun.

The Frogs, by Aristophanes

2012-02-04T18:14:00.000-08:00

The odds were firmly stacked against my liking The Frogs, in spite of my previously well reported love for the Sondheim play based on the same material. The supposed problem was with the author. Whole books have been written about the complex relationship between Socrates and Aristophanes; indeed, even up to the point of suggesting that Aristophanes' satirical view of Socrates in his plays may have placed a bit of Socrates' blood on the great comedian's hands. Readers of my joint blog with my wife know that Socrates is my spirit animal and I felt, as I was beginning to read this piece, I would be fellowshipping with darkness, as it were.

But then, as it turned out, I loved the piece unequivocally. It was the piece in all of the Harvard Classics which I have most enjoyed reading. I actually laughed out loud at one section. I do not expect that to happen again in the 42 volumes I have left to read. I found many comedic conventions employed which still have yet to be improved upon. In this, it is difficult to imagine a more concise definition of a comedic "classic."

We have a very different view of the gods in this piece, especially of Dionysus who goes from a chaotic murderer in the previous piece to a slapstick, foppish goofball. Dionysus is grieved over the death of the tragedian Euripides and, taking a cue from Heracles, decides to descend to the Underworld in order to bring Euripides back from the land of the dead. In fact, Dionysus goes seeking direction from Heracles dressed in a lionskin, just as Heracles did. This gives opportunity for more visual humor:

Heracles


Dionysus

I was amazed at the sophistication of the satire and meta-narrative. Aristophanes, in having Dionysus praise Euripides at the outset, sets him up to be mocked and roasted as the action unfolds, all without, presumably, delivering offense to those Euripideans in the audience. In the first few moments of the show, Xanthias reveals that the characters are aware that they are in a play (also referenced later in Hades when the audience is referred to as some of the more ignoble damned.) The section in which Dionysus judges between Euripides and Aeschylus to decide which he will bring back from the dead acts as a sort of Christmas tree on which Aristophanes gets to hang jabs at each of the playwrights. The part that elicited genuine, vocal laughter from me was when Aeschylus interrupts Euripides' prologue recitations with "... and lost his little flask of oil" at moments where the phrase fits perfectly while reducing the verbal image presented to absurdity. It is a form of humor that we still practice in "That's what she said" or when we add "...in bed" to the end of fortune cookie fortunes.

We as a society. Not we as in Laurie and I.

This piece, placed between The Bacchae and Cicero in our series, was a much needed respite. I would love to produce this play (direct actually. Or play Dionysus. I think the character, at least in this piece, is within my type-range.) I think the placement was an inspired stoke on the part of Dr. Eliot. We have the basis of understanding the material by this point, we are then given the opportunity to play with it. I feel that this is one of the great and important functions of education, specifically a Classical one. One must needs understand the rules, as they say, before one proceeds to break them.

The Bacchae, by Eurpides

2012-01-29T21:29:00.000-08:00

via spacepleb

Of all of the Greek tragedies we've covered so far, I wasn't surprised to find that this seems to be the one which is most widely in production today. I understand why and I think I should like to produce it myself. I find myself increasingly surprised and delighted that "there is nothing new under the sun" and that the Greeks were seeking answers to the very same sorts of questions we are asking today.

I might speculate that the appeal is in the more gruesome bits, hypothetically there for the sake of the moral. I see some similar tactics in our own culture where something horrible will be shown "for the sake of showing how horrible it is." The fundamentalist Christian Hell Houses which are put on around Hallowe'en spring to mind. Unless I'm completely misinterpreting, I believe Warren Ellis does a variety of that as well, a sort of moralism by showing immorality. A very popular technique. It panders to the Moral and Immoral alike. Here's William Hogarth's Gin Lane which was made to depict the evils of gin by graphic depiction:

One of the problems with this form of morality in entertainment is that the culture ends up chasing the dragon as it were. Exponential increases in the level of horrifying immorality leads to a moral callous on the population.

The action of the play is rife with chaos, but there is also sort of a harsh, Darwinian, vendetta morality to the way the events unfold. The action of the play also, largely, takes place onstage aside from the Day of the Locust bit at the end (if you don't get the reference, don't go look it up. Trust me.)

Dionysus is the god of wine and theater. His disciples are frantic, inebriated, violent madwomen. He is my favorite god in the Greek pantheon, probably because the chaos that surrounds him reminds me of observable reality. I feel like the worldview of Greek mythology is one of the darkest and least hopeful around (which is also, partially, why I think it is the most plausible outside of my own religious path.) There are gods and they are not your friends, but don't you dare slight them. If I were to provide a theme throughout the pieces I've read in this collection of Greek tragedy, that would be it. It is one way to answer a seemingly bleak, absurd, and random universe where death, madness, and disease are on the streets around you every day. I can relate.

The show begins, again, with a god coming onstage and delivering the exposition to the audience. Once again, it is also the god who is to afflict the primary character (and, once again, it is difficult to determine a protagonist in the piece.) There is a bone of comedy thrown to the audience in the two old men (or, at least, that's how I would play their scene.) Pentheus comes out and delivers sort of a "you kids get off of my lawn" admonition. His soldiers arrest Dionysus. They lock him up and he levels the palace in a great spectacle that would no doubt usher in the intermission.

Much like our "moralism" mentioned above, Pentheus has a remarkably strong interest in the doings and goings-on at a Bacchanal. It may be my modern sensibilities, but I sense a thick streak of dark comedy through this piece. Dionysus explains why it is necessary for Pentheus to do drag to witness the Bacchae. They tree him and it ends badly for Pentheus. And, for some reason, his mother. And his grandfather now that I think of it. Half of the production budget goes towards stage blood. We come away off our lunch and with a healthy fear of the divine.

Our next piece offers a much lighter view of the gods, Dionysus in particular, as Dr. Eliot, in his infinite wisdom, left a comedy for the end. After this procession of turgid and lachrymose human tragedy, opening the veins of sorrow all over the stage in front of an audience who, presumably, came in to escape their own problems, a comedic respite seems a most welcome apparition of an oasis as we traverse these shifting sands to oblivion. Or, as the wise man said:

Let Them Eat Glass!

2012-01-28T22:51:00.000-08:00

Laurie and I were recently lunching at the home of friends new enough to our lives to have been the occasion of our first visit to said home. On those occasions, I am to bookshelves as a moth to a flame, and the first hour or so of my visit to someone's home for the first time is usually consumed with talking about the books that they own.

On this occasion, one of their shelves contained a book that changed the course of my life when I was a young shaver and Laurie called on me to relate the story. The book was the autobiography of the comedic actor Harpo Marx, titled Harpo Speaks. I think I was around 10 or 11 at the time and my father and I were at a video store (which was a sort of store in which one could rent videotapes of films for a fee.) I don't know what I was intending on renting, but I'm sure it was some abysmal piece of childish tripe that my father was less than enthusiastic about having to be in the same house in which it was playing. Thinking quickly, he brought me an alternative suggestion, one that I'd never heard of. He brought me a copy of Duck Soup, which was one of the Marx Brothers' earlier films. This was my first encounter with the Marx Brothers and I decided to give it a try.

I loved it. My obsession with the Marx Brothers was the sort of obsession that only a 'tween is capable of maintaining, although the obsession quickly transferred as you shall see anon.

I remember going to Rizzoli's bookstore in South Coast Plaza and finding a copy of Harpo Marx's autobiography very soon after seeing the movie. I bought the book and read it with great gusto. I still have that copy and it is now in tatters from the number of times I read it. My obsession transferred from the Marx Brothers to an unusual place for the obsession of a Junior Higher: Alexander Woollcott.

Alexander Woollcott was a theater critic, wit, literary personality, and social commentator in the first half of the previous century. He held literary court at the Algonquin Hotel in New York, surrounding himself with a laundry list of luminaries of his day, including a close friendship with Harpo Marx. I began collecting the books of Alexander Woollcott in junior high. I still a have whole shelf devoted to him. Several of them are signed. Along with his more abundantly printed works, I have a rare copy of his ill-fated play which he co-wrote with George S. Kaufman called The Dark Tower, a collection of his reportage from the first World War for Stars and Stripes, and several other rarities which I must check my pride in not listing here at great length. I have now been a collector of Woollcottalia twice as long as I was ever not one.

Woollcott was, as I mentioned, among other things, passionately interested in literature and the theater. Those passions transferred to me. I began to branch out and read George Bernard Shaw, Somerset Maugham (I remember taking The Moon and Sixpence with me to a Quaker junior high camp), Dorothy Parker, and so forth, which then lead to Faulkner and Hemingway and Whitman and Poe and Twain and many many others. I remark on this because, before I saw Duck Soup, I was not a child particularly inclined towards reading and certainly not towards reading anything serious. A slapstick comedy from the 1930s set me on the course towards intellectualism. Laurie asked me, earlier today when we were discussing this, what I think I would have become has it not been for that chance encounter with that film. I answered that I probably would have been your run of the mill Comic-Con geek, playing RPGs, waiting outside a movie theater at midnight to see the latest costumed hero movie, and posting .gifs from The Big Bang Theory on my Tumblr as the closest thing I get to a creative act.

I have a more complex set of reactions to my entrance into love for compositional music, specifically contemporary experimental music. Back in Orange County, I used to listen to KUSC, the world-class local classical music station, and specifically loved The Record Shelf which was hosted by Jim Svejda. Listening to that show was like taking a free classical music appreciation course. I remember Mr. Svejda, at one point, expressing his disdain for what was a ponderous, extraordinarily difficult opera about Albert Einstein on a beach. Like so much of life, the object forbidden to me by an authority took on a special place of interest and, at the end of my teens, I became a fan of the music of Philip Glass.

I do still admire Woollcott a great deal and I still think he was wonderful (evident, no doubt, in my verbosity and circumlocution.) As someone known in the circles in which I travel as a "book person," I am sometimes asked about, say, the Harry Potter books. For the record, how I feel about them is that there is a whole upcoming generation who may very well have been hooked into being life-long readers from the series, far more than anything that happened to the generation that I grew up in. This is an excellent and hopeful development. Do I think they're great? Not particularly. But, I feel that people who engage with the world around them, who interact with different ideas and viewpoints, who value knowledge and art, really do make the world a better place. I feel the world would be a better place if such values spread like wildfire, not if they are kept in a secret chamber where the people who hold the esoteric knowledge can feel smart and superior to the common rabble. I feel that people can aspire towards higher concepts like beauty, truth, virtue, and peace; the reflection of the divine within the limited scope of our existence. I will even go so far as to say things like that at the risk of sounding snotty and judgmental in the suggestion that there are "baser" things.

But there are. There are low and base entertainments; there is art that reflects the highest aspirations of humankind; and there is a vast grey area of places in-between. And we all have a lifetime in which to interact with them, communicate with them, and come to our own conclusion. Possibly even make some of our own. Like what you like and interact with what hooks you.

Every time I mention Philip Glass, someone makes a denigrating joke or remark, and I'm not here to shame anyone for doing so. I get it. Saying Philip Glass is your favorite composer is like saying Danny Elfman is your favorite composer. However, I would like to offer my own point of view. If I had a young and promising relative of about 13 or 14, I would not buy them something by Arnold Schoenberg. I would buy them Glass' Solo Piano or Hydrogen Jukebox or possibly Satyagraha. There is nothing wrong with liking the things that you like, being where you are, and seeking to better yourself where you are. Sure, at some point you will probably move from living on milk to meat, but there are also grapes and yogurt and rye bread and horehound candies and olives and any number of other means of sustenance, which science has known for well over a year that a healthy diet is one of variety.

Or, perhaps a more apt metaphor, the lamppost directly inside the wardrobe to Narnia is a fantastic object. The magic draws Lucy in and is the catalyst for a great deal of adventure. Of course, the Pevensies don't spend the rest of their lives camped out next to the lamppost. They have a whole world to explore! But is the lamppost any less magical than reaching Cair Paravel? Is it any less a part of Narnia? Do we imagine the full grown Pevensies mocking the time when they were so entranced by the lamppost, unaware of the wonders to follow?

It is my belief that there are far too many obstacles in our culture to seeking to better one's self, be they economic, peer pressure, levels of difficulty, fear of scorn. If I can be so crassly Wagnerian, it is not the job of the Guardians of Splendor to bar the gates to keep out the riff-raff. Our brave new world does a fine enough job of that on its own. Rather it is ours to beat the drum as loudly as we possibly can and hope open the gates as wide as they can go.

Hippolytus, by Euripides

2012-01-22T20:09:00.000-08:00

In this life where so often we are rationed out pat little packages of worldviews, it is helpful to broaden one's self and have occasion to reevaluate what one takes for granted. I feel that we grow closer to truth by having the truths we hold challenged, grow closer to the fellow inhabitants of this planet by trying on different worldviews, and, Borg-like, come away with useful bits gleaned. As Solomon wrote, "Do you see a man who is wise in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him."

Much like genetics and pathology, variety is not only life's very spice, but the glue that holds existence together and, I would even go so far as to suggest, one of the keys to a peaceful existence.

In college, I studied Cultural Anthropology with Professor Paul Apodaca and one of the points that has stuck with me all of these years later (along with my studies in Freud) is the concept of taboo in civilization. I distinctly remember Professor Apodaca saying that incest is one of the only nearly universal taboos in humankind, even within cultures where other widespread taboos (like cannibalism) exist. One could make a fairly succinct argument of the evolutionary functions for the emergence of that taboo. There are also the psychological effects of a secure family unit (and the psychological terrors of an insecure one) as well as the customary moral, social, and religious proscriptions on transgressing taboos to the extent that most healthy individuals never even consciously dream of breaking said taboos. This is a very good thing.

We have already established that the Greeks employed heightened emotional manipulation for the purpose of hooking the audience into the action of their dramatic works. I would add that this is at least the second play in this series in which the subject of incest comes up, likely because it is such an efficacious emotional manipulator.

I find that taboos can be helpful to a civilization, as can morals, ethics, and manners. Restraint in society shows a regard for others, that one sees the value of others and chooses to take that into account vis-à-vis their own behavior. Cultures establish taboos to preserve the culture. Taboos can be valuable and should be employed, I feel, when they promote the opportunity for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (in that order) in all of the citizenship.

One of the "different set of eyes" which I have found fascinating in this series is the role of the gods in the lives of humans in the Greek worldview. They have a built in answer for the apparent absurdity of existence. In this piece, bad things happen to people because a goddess gets moody and feels slighted. In other words, the tragedy unfolds because of things people didn't do. Aphrodite is upset because Hippolytus goes hunting with Athena and is apparently asexual or, at least, pursuing interests outside of the boudoir. This bothers Aphrodite to the point where she decides to burn his family to the ground and salt the Earth where once they grew. Every time I've been in an automobile accident I've marveled a bit over how leaving my home a minute or two earlier or later would have averted the whole situation. It occurs to me that this view of the gods offers some ready-made solutions in moments like that.

Aphrodite, in her rage, strikes Phaedra, Hippolytus' step-mother, with a mad crush on Hippolytus. I was surprised to find that no one in the piece, faced with this information, says, "Well, knock that off! That's totally inappropriate, Phaedra!" Her nurse almost commits self-slaughter faced with the knowledge. But, for the most part, her crush is treated like cancer. It is unfortunate, but she can't just walk it off. I was mystified by that part of the play. I suppose it was an attempt to make Phaedra a sympathetic character, but I'm not entirely sure why she needed to be sympathetic or why Euripides thought that would work as a character choice. I mean, it's like saying "Yes, I murdered my wife, but it's not my fault because I was really really angry at the time." I had the same sort of difficulty (albeit much more strongly) when I tried to read Ayn Rand many years ago. Yes, I see what they are trying to get me to sympathize with, but I don't! I reject the premise because what they are talking about is evil, no matter how much they zazz it up with rhetoric - a major difference being that I never physically threw the book of Euripides across the room.

So, Phaedra hangs herself and things continue to deteriorate from there. Hippolytus gets chased down and dragged, thanks to a water buffalo. Theseus shoots his mouth off and, as a result, has to watch all of his loved ones die. Artemus is, at the end, waiting to get revenge on Aphrodite and we walk out of the theater having had the embodiment of romantic love presented as the ultimate antagonist, having heard a long anti-woman tirade, having witnessed a grandfather kill his grandson because he granted his son three curses (which I'm not sure I can imagine a place in which that would be an appropriate gift.) In my mind, this is the very model of a problem play.

I do have to say that it was an entertaining work and certainly thought provoking. Here I am days later still mulling over exactly what I was supposed to think and why. But I do think that there is profit in the exercise even if I come to different conclusions. It gives me opportunity to evaluate what I believe and why, and what I don't believe and why. Time engaged in that activity is never wasted time.

The next two pieces in this series is deal with my favorite Greek god, which is to say Dionysus. In the next piece, heads will roll. In the piece that follows, The Frogs, based solely on what I've experienced here, I think Dionysus is correct in choosing Aeschylus as the superior playwright to Euripides.

Antigone, by Sophocles

2012-01-14T22:53:00.000-08:00

The shift from Aeschylus to Sophocles brings a variety of thematic differences. There are certainly different views of women and of gods (which is not to say that they were of different beliefs, rather that they were of different points of view. The God of Thomas Merton and the God of William F. Buckley look very different from one another, but both men were of the Roman Catholic church.)

This is the first Greek tragedy in our series in which the main character doesn't actually do anything wrong. The tragic "heroes" of Aeschylus are people who do wrong for possibly understandable reasons and suffer the consequences. Sophocles has Oedipus who makes a series of horrible mistakes, but for the most part they are simply tragic mistakes. But Antigone, in fact, suffers punishment for doing right. She buries her brother (twice actually) with no fear of consequences and is proud to admit it. I might even mention the political undertone of what is right superseding what is law in behavior befitting a virtuous citizen. Antigone herself is, I might argue, our first strong, good woman in our series of Greek tragedies. She is a person of great conviction and integrity.

Also, it passes the Bechdel Test.

As an aside, there was a play by Jean Anouilh written in Nazi occupied France that was a retelling of the Antigone story, seemingly with a Nazi-style government as Creon's reign, but written ambiguously enough to pass the censors. In college, I really wanted to mount a production of it, but, like so much of my theater stories, it never ended up happening. In it, Antigone gives this famous rousing speech to Creon:

"I am disgusted with your happiness! With your life that must go on, come what may. You could say you are all like dogs that lick everything they find. You with your promise of a humdrum happiness--provided a person doesn't ask much of life. I want everything of life, I do; and I want it total, complete: otherwise I reject it! I will not be moderate. I will not be satisfied with the bit of cake offered for being a good little girl. I want to be sure of everything this very day; sure that everything will be as beautiful as when I was a little girl. If not, I want to die!"

It is an uncompromising vision, just as the Antigone of Sophocles. I confess that I admire both Antigones.

The gods do not make an appearance in this piece, however I would like to point out an emerging trend that I am sensing. There is a sense of "sin" in Greek mythology. However, one of the key differences between sin to their gods and sin in Christianity is that their gods are not necessarily nice, fair, and certainly don't seem to have our best interests at heart. It reminds me a bit of Shintoism in that above all one ought to do everything in one's power not to offend the gods. There is an element of "sins of the father" in this play.

The sins of Creon seem to be two-fold. He punishes Antigone for deeds that ought not be punished and his other major sin, I contend, is that he fails to listen to the wisdom of Tiresias. It would seem likely to me that that would be a mortal sin in the Ancient Greek worldview. All of his sins get jumbled in the stew, but the price that Creon pays is devastating.

It is my belief that the price that Creon pays indicates the author's belief about who was right and who was wrong in the piece. It is also my belief that Antigone receives a really bleak sort of grey hint of a reward when her beloved and she are united in the Underworld. I have to confess, whenever I read a Greek play, I always imagine that Hades is like it's portrayed in Sondheim's version of The Frogs. This is probably grossly misguides my opinions. I sing Pluto's song from that play while I'm working all the time!

I would also confess that if I were Dionysus (and I am still waiting for my wife to paint a portrait of me as Dionysus) and I went to Hades to bring back the better playwright, I think I very well might bring Sophocles over Aeschylus. In spite of the fashion sketches that the latter inspired. Or maybe it's just that I find the world of Sophocles more compelling and accurate. Aeschylus had a rigid sense of right and wrong, crime and punishment. In Sophocles, people make horrible mistakes and good people suffer tremendously as well as the bad. That seems more like the nature of the universe I've come to understand.

Ask Paul Mathers: Are Americans interested in Sir Thomas Browne?

2012-01-10T23:20:00.000-08:00

You can ask Paul Mathers a question about arts/literature/culture/history/etiquette by sending it to: askpaulmathers@gmail.com

As mentioned, here's a link to my post on Religio Medici: http://ticklemebrahms.blogspot.com/2010/12/religio-medici-by-sir-thomas-browne.html

You can buy a paperback copy (the very same imprint as the one I own) of Religio Medici here: http://www.amazon.com/Religio-Medici-Hydriotaphia-Classic-Reprint/dp/1440061238/ref=sr_1_13?ie=UTF8&qid=1326266180&sr=8-13

And here you can download an eBook edition for cheap (although the misspelling of the author's name raises my eyebrow a bit): http://www.amazon.com/Religio-Medici-ebook/dp/B004IAS15O/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1326266304&sr=1-2

Prometheus Bound

2012-01-09T20:45:00.000-08:00

On Sunday, Laurie and I were talking to our friend Tim about Louis XIV. I secretly admire Louis XIV's techniques for strengthening France and his socio-political prowess, but am careful not to say it too loudly or too often as history hasn't treated Louis favorably (I am hoping to not get ejected from Cannes.) Tim mentioned how Louis wanted everything to flow directly from his throne, to be the dispenser of everything, to demand dependence. Laurie mentioned that there was a temptation to do that as a parent (for example, not teach your children to cook so that they will keep needing you.) In spite of my conviction that information should flow freely, I can totally understand this temptation. I think it perfectly illustrates the sin of Prometheus.

One of the cardinal rules that we learned in my college play-writing courses was to "show and not tell." You can, of course, have the "Robert Shaw talking about the sharks" monologue at some point, so long as you show the audience plenty of actual shark carnage through the rest of the show. The Greek tragedians seem to have had no such rule. While there is spectacle, it is often not where we would have put it. They talk about the fall of the gods, about the chaining of Prometheus, about the storms that are to batter Prometheus on his rock, and we meet a character who, in her future history, is going to turn into a cow (extra credit opportunity: I knew the story of Io and was totally confused over whether or not she was a cow in this play. I kept switching back and forth in my head as I read like the Ghost of Christmas Past.) None of these are shown onstage, but a guy does come riding in on a four-footed bird. It reminded me that while I was reading The Oresteia I thought, "I know the script has the murders take place offstage, but in my production they would sure as heck be in full bloody view of the audience!"

A point of interest about the play is that it was traditionally attributed to Aeschylus, but modern scholarship now has grave and serious doubts over the authorship. There have been arguments over the author's meter and line structure. One of the more compelling arguments, in my opinion, is over the discrepancy in the view of Zeus in The Oresteia and the view of Zeus in Prometheus Bound. My personal opinion is that the arguments are compelling enough to have me refer to it as "the author of Prometheus Bound" rather than Aeschylus. In any discussion of doubt of the authenticity of authorship of a piece of literature, I feel it is best to attempt to see through the arguments to the motivations of those arguing. That is why, for example, I feel compelled to agree with the doubt on the Pauline authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews (most of those who make the argument would have nothing but gain from an actual apostolic author) while I reject outright the questioning of Shakespeare's authorship (an argument that has always struck me as conspicuously classist.)

I chose Edith Hamilton's translation. I think Hamilton's work will fill in most of what Robert Fagles didn't get around to translating for me as I read through the Greeks. Like Fagles, I would read anything Edith Hamilton had anything to do with and likely would have followed her off a cliff if called upon to do so. Edith Hamilton was one of the awesome, underrated figures in academic history, artfully building bridges from the common reader to the sublime (I almost went with "putting the ambrosia on a lower shelf," but feared it would sound like a back-handed compliment.)

As for the play itself, in spite of what I said above about action and spectacle, I think it is a wildly successful piece. There is so much heightened emotion and the speeches are so evocative that I feel it would be a delight for any actor to perform. The mythology is rich and potent. We are left with a universe in which a sovereign god who hates us knows that his days are numbered. Like Herod, Zeus' insecurity over the prophecy is leading him to effect the most atrocious outcomes on innocents. Most of the goodness and, indeed, humanness that we enjoy in our existence was a gift from a god who is now being tortured for having given that gift. Prometheus is clearly put forth as the protagonist and I was especially moved by his defiance in the face of threats and torture. Aware of his own immortality, he does not care how much torture is doled out on him so long as he is being true and virtuous. This seems to be the moral of the story from a distant culture which was convinced of the immortality of the soul. This is what it means to live as though that were true.

Winter Fashion from The House of Atreus

2012-01-04T12:43:00.000-08:00

If you've ever read Mortimer Adler, you'll be familiar with his almost bullying suggestion that a serious reader must have books that look a mess. He contends that one must fully interact with a book, to wear it out with underlining, highlighting, dog-ears, margin notes, and so forth. Having grown up with library books and being more than a little vain, I was not, in my formative years, inclined in this direction. I found his argument compelling and, in my personal library, you can tell whether I've read a book before or after hearing Mr. Adler out.

So often I find that I want to take digging into what I am reading even further. Much like I said in my previous posts, I not only want to consume books, but also allow them to consume me. Most of you also know that I majored in Theater with a great deal of focus toward the production end. Most of you also know of my intense interest in fashion.

Laurie and I have decided to set aside a day or two each week as "Project Nights." We've found that even when one tries to elevate the entertainment, it is still a very easy trap to come home in the evening and park one's self in front of a lighted screen. So now, one night a week, we forbid Facebook, movies, and so forth and focus our waking hours on creative acts. Gina even joined in and retaught herself to knit.

For Christmas, my aunt sent me an artist's sketchbook (large, blank, white pages.) I had been wanting to get back into sketching. I thought it might be nice to create preliminary design sketches for a production of The Oresteia which, odds are, I shall never have the real opportunity to produce. Like so much of design, the ideas are the most engaging part and the realization is a luxury reserved for those with the astonishingly good fortune to be able to get funding for their design work.

It has been at least five years since I have sketched anything at all, so I beg your gentleness. Great or not, it is a thing that I have accomplished. I found it to be a charming way to interact with material that I am reading, one in which I break out of the exclusively analytical. I will tell/warn you, I intend to do more of this sort of thing.

I began with the Furies, who I found to be some of the most compelling characters in the trilogy. Wonky perspective and placement should reveal that the figure in the center was the first of the three which I drew. By happy accident, the shoulders and arms came out much more masculine than I had originally intended and that early moment lead to a complete rethinking of my mind's eye production. I had intended to mount a traditional production, but the shoulder's made me think "Of course the Furies are drag queens!"

From there I focused my efforts towards a production where the modern and the ancient blur. I tried to create a different sort of modern feminine look for each of the three, each of which were rather harried. The figure in the center's dress is meant to suggest skin removed with exposed muscles. They are all, of course, dressed in blood colors. One of the steps in the process of stage design that I used to love was the creation of a color palette for the production. In this one, I have reds and blues to highlight the steel and blood, rage and death, and so forth. There are some purples for royalty and whites and brights for gods. I decided to have not a stitch of green onstage because green suggests life and growth to me.

The figure seated is Orestes. The antechamber is open just enough to glimpse the carnage. In spite of how your mind might wish to fill in the colors of his suit, I am thinking he ought to be exactly as drawn, in a white suit with dark blue outlines. This is to tie him a bit with a motif I had for the gods and to something else which I'll discuss later. His hair is bowlish and suggests a helmet.

Apollo came out with a hint of twinkishness about him, I think, but I think it's acceptable for Apollo to have a dash of the twink. He's the god of light after all. He is, however, meant to be holding a lantern in the sketch and not a purse. I sort of like the idea of playing around with the concept of an imposing figure from a variety of directions. Perhaps this says more about my own worldview.

I have no idea why Clytemnestra ended up at a Batman villain angle. I wanted her to be somewhat of what the contemporary colloquialism would deem "a cougar." I also wanted for her and Aegithus to be the most indecent characters in the whole piece. I expect the awkward intimacy of their robe lengths would be highlighted whenever they are in a scene with anyone else. I picture Aegithus as a bit of an entitled snob, but I also wanted his wardrobe color scheme to mirror Orestes in the ever so slightest suggestion of the Oedipal. As a side note, Laurie walked by when I was drawing Aegithus and said, "Ha! Nice Dr. Manhattan there!"

Athena turned out to be my personal favorite of the lot. I cannot put my finger on which female pop musician from my childhood that she reminds me of, but I would insist that sparks actually come off of her crown.

I wanted Electra to harken the most back to Agamemnon. I think it fitting and probably reveals my thoughts on the appropriate character choices, her motivations and so forth. I felt like every action and probably nearly every word spoken by her character point to her super-objective of honoring her fallen father (and the anguish over the gross dishonor that has come upon him.) She is a bit more of a child in this sketch than I would anticipate in actual casting. I think "waif" in general is more what I would envision, but maybe more of a young woman wasting away in fury. I pictured Agamemnon as a sort of "fallen" version of Paul Heerman's bust of Winter.

There is the fruit of my evening's work. I did not make any set design sketches, but I imagine I shall in the future (for future texts. I think this finally marks the end of my dalliance in The House of Atreus.) Dioramas, puppets, and incidental music to follow.

The Eumenides, by Aeschylus

2012-01-02T17:00:00.000-08:00

I have to retract one statement from my post about The Libation Bearers. I had said that Orestes was not an authorized executor of justice in the eyes of gods nor man, which was nearly true save for one detail which proves crucial to the final installment. Apollo, in fact, authorizes Orestes to execute justice, a decision that makes our third act a thriller juridique.

Our title characters are The Furies. They exist to punish those who kill blood relations. I think more than once it comes up that The Furies didn't seem to mind that Clytemnestra killed Agamemnon, to which they reply that they were married, not blood related. So, that's like having an IRS agent come to your house for an audit and accidentally leaving your bong in full view. It's not good, but they're probably not going to bust you for it.

Orestes runs to Apollo, who is firmly advocating for Orestes. The Ghost of Clytemnestra wakes The Furies and bullies and badgers them to chase down Orestes (so, you see, death hasn't improved her at all.) The Furies and Orestes wind up in Athens, before the court of Athena no less. Athena agrees to hear their cases and decide.

Apollo makes a speech which is compelling within the context of the play and sexist within the context of everything else (although it is difficult to think of any way in which Clytemnestra could be a sympathetic character.) Apollo also plays the Zeus card. The judges' votes tie and Orestes goes free.

The Furies are left with the problem of their function. They repeatedly refer to the shame involved in losing the case. The end of the play got a little weird for me. Much like Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, there is a sort of nationalism (or, in this case, a sort of metro-centrism) that, to me, seems to have come out of left field. The play ends with Athena raising the Furies to a position of protectors (Kindly Ones) of Athens. The script seems to suggest that the action of the play leaves the theater and Athena, the Furies, and the audience go parading through the streets of the city at the end, blessing the people of Athens.

When I was a child, I had a week long Sea Camp that I attended in Dana Point. We spent the week learning about sea life. At the end of the week, one of the key features of the camp was an overnight stay on a ship which is a recreation of a 1770's privateer ship. We gathered in the science center where we had spent the week learning about plankton and whatnot and a man came in identifying himself as the first mate. He explained that we would be "the crew" of the ship overnight and would be lifting barrels and sleeping in cots and waking up in the middle of the night to "watch" and log and so forth. We would eat a biscuit for dinner. Stuff like that. Then the captain came in. He was a man with a booming voice and really put on the hardness of a ship's captain. He scared the bejeebers out of me. I have an almost unhealthy capacity to suspend my disbelief. Through the afternoon we performed little tasks on the ship and when, inevitably, we would goof off or do something wrong, the captain would bellow "Avast!" with a voice loud as thunder.

And we spent the night in the boat. I was woken up to do my watch which probably was only about 10 minutes, but seemed like 4 hours in the freezing ocean air. Incidentally, this is probably the week where the ocean burned deeply into my psyche. I love the ocean and everything to do with it. I miss it tremendously and, every year or so, get almost an ache to visit the ocean.

The next morning, the camp had a beach party planned for us kids. We all had our towels and so forth. We got in lines and were walked down to the beach by the counselors and here is the reason why I'm telling this story. The guy who was the captain half stayed in character on that next day. I distinctly remember almost 30 years later, walking down the street, coming to a stoplight, and the man bellowing out "Avast!" I'm not sure this was intentional, but the effect was that it really blurred the lines between what was the theatrical and what was "real."

In a way, I feel like I may have been seeking to recapture that all of my life. I think I should like to live in that grey area. It is why I am so delighted when Groucho or Woody Allen turn to the camera and address the audience, or when the Stage Manager from Our Town acts as a priest between the audience and the characters.

And I think that is what Aeschylus was trying to do. He was attempting to break the characters out of the drama and, harnessing the power of theater, force the very gods to bless the city of Athens. I think that that is one of the aims of art. We seek to ameliorate our condition. In a state of such absurdity, so much suffering and loneliness, we create constructs of a more beautiful world and then kick the walls down so that we might travel back and forth between the two worlds freely.

The Libation Bearers, by Aeschylus

2012-01-01T16:22:00.000-08:00

This drawing is an early Cliff's Notes for the first two plays.

My step-daughter recently returned from the Republic of Georgia and, somewhere in the days that followed her return, she acquired the first season of a contemporary television series. It is called Desperate Housewives. In the ensuing days, our television (normally off) was employed in the task of bringing Gina up through the first season of that series (to my chagrin, I am given to understand that there are about 18 more seasons.) In passing through the room, I found myself amazed that the matter of the show was unfiltered, old-fashioned melodrama. I was further surprised, as I was reading The Oresteia, by the similarities. Rampant adultery, revenge plots, murder, family drama. There are differences, of course. The contemporary show is marked by incessant music to indicate that something funny is going on, and there is, germane to the culture from which it sprung, absolutely no reverence toward, nay, nor much in the way of mention of, the gods, save in mocking religious people who live on Wisteria (as in the name of the street. The people on the show don't live on Wisteria like the Lotus Eaters live on Lotus.)

I do not wish to suggest, by any stretch of the imagination, that Desperate Housewives is high art and destined to rise to a throne in the halls of posterity as one of the pinnacles of our age. However, it is important to remember that so much of what we look to in art is a connection with issues that we all deal with, the universal drama, albeit so often a heightened version. Indeed, the dramatic tension calls for consistent heightening of the emotional hooks in order to drag the audience through the action of the piece.

When Gina had to read Hamlet for a college course a few years ago, I strongly urged her to rent a film version (although seeing it live would be even more ideal) because plays are meant to be seen. Shakespeare is wonderful to read, wonderful to pour over those gooey, but perfectly molded lines. But the author's intention with the piece was for you, his audience, to go into a room full of other people and see the work on a stage. I believe that we are meant to feel the pull of sitting 20 some feet from a man kneeling at the grave of his slain, cuckolded, humiliated father and identify with the feelings of rage and vengeance, to be in the room with the tension as Orestes talks with Clytemnestra, to feel the gut revulsion at the pile of butchered human that Orestes walks over at the end. Drama is literature made tactile. It is a means by which an author can sweep a reader directly into his or her work. We ought to apply the lessons gained from those experiences to our lives. We are expected to identify with them. If we are to get anything out of the experience, we must enter the world and glean the lessons therein.

Like so much of drama, this is also a cautionary tale. If I were to mount a production, I would probably adopt as the theme of the trilogy that phrase often attributed to Gandhi that an eye for an eye will leave the whole world blind. I almost feel as if the trilogy ought to be performed in one night as one show, rather than producing each individually. The moment at the end of The Libation Bearers where it is awkwardly obvious to everyone, especially, it would seem, Orestes, that the tableau is the exact same one as at the end of Agamemnon (the killer stepping over two butchered bodies) sets it up for what is most likely to come (judging from the title of the third play, I have my suspicions about where this is going.)

I don't want to be flip and I am well aware that I am treading on the very thin ice of speaking about aspects of American culture which are entirely alien to me, but I was instantly reminded of the contemporary street culture practice of "pouring a 40 out on the curb for one's fallen homies." I am assured that this is a thing that actually happens in gangster culture, which I am also assured is actually a real thing. I've heard tell of such things and, in fact, observed a bit of it in my years in public school. Otherwise, I am about as alien to that culture as one can get.

The parallel that sprung to my mind was that Clytemnestra sends Electra to pour wine out on the grave of Agamemnon. Clytemnestra, it seems, is having horrible nightmares and mistakenly assumes that it is from the angry tomb of Agamemnon rather than severe guilt over murdering her husband. Funny how projecting works. It is not lost on us, the Chorus, nor the two children, that were the much sinned against dead able to speak, he would be much more demonstrative over Clytemnestra having killed him than interested in having a bit of a tipple.

Likewise, in the gangster cultural practice of actually physically pouring out a portion of malt liquor, one imagines that the hypothetical fallen in the territorial combat of gangs, given the opportunity to speak from beyond the grave (regardless if it holds oblivion or damnation) would more likely call for a plague on both their houses, perhaps with choice words for the structure of class which gives rise to such cultures in the worlds of those to whom opportunities to prosper are barred. Those attempting to honor are still possessed of those effects for which the murder occurred, namely a culture revolving around guns, bitches, and bling.

Enough of that, though. Clytemnestra shows no sign of repentance, but rather simply wants physic for the tempests in her skull. Orestes delivers that outcome by more active means, but the play would have us understand that justice has still not been served. Orestes now takes up the mantle of "wrong" and runs off to Delphi with it.

I wonder about the author's intent and the many places one could choose to take this material if one mounted a production. I mentioned the "justice" theme, but I think there is also an anti-vigilante twinge. Orestes is not, in the eyes of gods or man, an authorized executor of justice. He is, therefore, in the wrong on a cosmic scale in attempting to deliver justice. But what would justice really look like in this case? In America, the police would arrest the couple, they would appear before a judge and jury of their peers, they would, most likely, be sent to death row in most states where they would, eventually, be executed. An argument could be made that the only difference between that and what Orestes does is a matter of time, hands in the pot, and cost. Surely, being stripped of their gains and removed from society would be entirely appropriate to the crime.

Ultimately, and I think the next play will bear me out, the thesis of Aeschylus is that justice is the domain of the gods ("Vengeance is mine," saith the Lord) and not for the hands of man. But how far can one take that view in a universe where the gods are so quiet?

I think another possible theme is that of the great wheel of karma. Orestes is both the reaper and sower in this case, sort of caught between the cogs of the wheel.

Needless to say, I am enjoying these plays a great deal.

An Exciting Talking Picture Announcement!!

2011-12-31T21:47:00.000-08:00

Send those questions to: askpaulmathers{atsymbol}gmail.com

The Loot

2011-12-27T19:20:00.000-08:00

Let's get down to brass tacks. What we got for Christmas:

My biggest gift was from my parents. It's a laptop and I am currently typing on it. I can even be social as I blog. I'm blogging in the kitchen right now.

I won't list everything that Laurie got since this is my blog and not hers, but she did get this PBS art history series.

Laurie also got a Kindle. We are amazed at how much of the sort of thing we read is available for free, being firmly set in the public domain.

We also got a board game based upon the players' knowledge of the first lines of books.

The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick is a book which I have waited my adult life to read (not literally. In spite of what appearances might suggest, I've done other things with my adult life as well), rather suspecting that I would never have the opportunity. I do have the "excerpts from" which was published back in the 1990s, but this is the san gréal for PKD fans. This is the Exegesis.

Another book I am beside myself with joy to own and read is the Journals of Spalding Gray.

We got garden gnomes climbing a rope for my mother.

Edgar Allan Poe tea.

My aunt sent me a sketchbook, which was a wonderful choice. Ever since that Lagerfeld film I have been thinking of getting back into sketching, specifically design ideas that will never see realization.

I think these are in reverse chronological order, but we had a lovely dinner.

Gina brought us wine from Georgia. It has Joseph Stalin on it.

I bought Laurie a scarf/shawl by Karl Lagerfeld.

Laurie got me a cultural history of ballet, which I immediately started reading.

Schubert got a splendid little hat.

Gina brought me a book of Georgian poetry.

Gina brought Laurie art from Georgia.

Laurie bought me a messenger bag. For the sake of brevity, Laurie bought me some wonderful new clothes. I bought her a few books. There were other things. But the big news is Tony and Karina who got us a grandchild for Christmas. Ezekiel Anthony was born on the 23rd.

That was our Christmas in brief. It was undoubtedly on the short list of my favorites in my life so far.

Time Capsule

2011-12-26T16:11:00.000-08:00

Dear Ezekiel,

On the day you were born, your great-grandparents were up visiting for Christmas. They gave me the laptop on which I write this for that very Christmas. They took your Oma and I out to dinner and I had a martini that tasted like toasted marshmallows. Aunt Gina was there too. She had just returned from the Republic of Georgia a few days before. She had been teaching English over there.

They let me leave work early on account of your being born and, as I'm sure you're used to by the time you read this, the maddening beat of the impending holiday, like a heart under the floorboards.

It was a slow news day. Newt Gingrich failing to file the signatures required for him to get into the Virginia primary was one of the top news stories. Newt Gingrich was a man who ran for president in 2012. Believing in a benevolent God, I assume you will never have heard of him. The Sherlock Holmes film with Stephen Fry as Mycroft Holmes was the top grossing film. If I live long enough for you to get to know me, I'm sure you'll know exactly who that was. Also perhaps worth mentioning, there were people who said that the world would end just shy of a year after you were born due to some blip in an ancient civilization's calendar. Early in the year you were born, a charlatan predicted a date on which the world would end and then, when it didn't, picked another date later in the year. Some people were fooled both times. I hope you'll take this as a lesson about secret knowledge, conspiracy theories, and people trying to sell themselves as special with the sexy temptation of being a present "insider" (and future fool.)

Earlier we had gone to visit you at Enloe. I held you when you were only about an hour and a half out of your mother. You didn't open your eyes and we didn't hear you cry for two more days. You were a very peaceful baby. May you remain so.

I intend to teach you Shakespeare and Shaw, Beethoven and Mozart, Socrates and Schopenhauer. I intend to buy a high-end telescope so that we can look into the heavens. I hope that we can travel and I hope that you will see the world. I especially hope to take you to the theater, the opera, and the ballet when you are old enough to shut up and not wiggle around in your seat the whole time. This past Sunday, which was Christmas, I was talking to my pastor after the service and he talked about how it's difficult to produce a Christmas sermon. One must present the Advent story, a story which one can assume that almost the entirety of the congregants know. I remembered when I performed my first (hopefully not last) one-man show a few years ago. So many people expressed that they wished that I would have recorded the event on video. I would always reply that it wasn't staged for video, but more importantly, it wasn't for the ages. It was, like so much of life, a moment in time that exists within the space-time frame, but, as far as we are concerned, has passed out of our reach through the progression of time.

That's part of why I love photography so much. The picture above is of the moment when I first held you. As you can see, people were rushing around us. The room was full of activity and vistors. But the camera captured the light of that moment and now you can see it, your hypothetical children can see it, and the alien archeologists of the 45th century can see it. There is a beauty in and of itself to the preservation of beauty, but there is also a beauty to the fleeting in its ungraspability. There is wonder in both and, indeed, in all things.

I hope you get to experience a multitude, a veritable glut of ideas and world-views. You get to choose the ones you love, the ones you adopt, the ones you improve upon, the ones you reject outright. You get to make ones of your own.

I don't know what the experience of life will be like for you or what the combined forces of nature and nurture will produce in you. I hope you will be happy. I hope you will come to understand the necessity of kindness, compassion, and peacefulness. I hope that you will learn that you need not doff your hat to any man, as we are all created equal. I hope you will share and love truth. I hope you will not be tempted to the overwhelming trend toward the trite and bourgeois emotional life of our day, which presents such asininities as boredom and self-righteousness as birthrights. They aren't. They are both born from the pit of Hell.

Anyway, welcome. I hope you have fun.

Your loving Papageno,
Paul Mathers

The Effects of Karl Lagerfeld on the Soul of Paul Mathers

2011-12-13T13:02:00.000-08:00

I almost never write about movies we've watched. I do tend toward movies that inspire or provoke or have great ideas. While I do try to use the blog to interact with the higher aspirations of humankind, it's really just that I don't want to have the sort of blog where I talk about movies. I am breaking that self-imposed rule here for the sake of something Laurie and I watched which has been like a splinter under my fingernail. The film was Lagerfeld Confidential.

I try not to place too many of my eggs in the "heroes" basket and, aside from Stephen Fry, I am hard pressed to think of many living people who would qualify for that distinction in my own mind. However, I do have a great deal of people of interest in my life and, as people who know me well know well, Karl Lagerfeld is one of those people. For those of you who don't know, Mr. Lagerfeld is the Creative Director of Chanel, Fendi, and his own lines. He is also an extraordinarily accomplished photographer. He is a highly intelligent man, a bit of a Classicist himself with a fluency in Greek and Latin (and German and French and English and Italian.) He has one of the famous and coveted personal libraries in the world.

One thing I do not wish to do here is to pass judgment on Mr. Lagerfeld's life based on a 90 minute movie nor, more to the point, on my emotional reactions to that 90 minute movie. I felt a magnificent loneliness in the film, and I felt as if it were by the design of the documentary filmmaker. It seemed to me that the interview segments interspersed with the action of the film were full of questions that attempted to lead Lagerfeld to comment on his loneliness. There were questions about his mother, his love life, his intense work ethic, the frivolity of the world in which he works, the distance of friends, his ability to break long-term ties, all of which Lagerfeld explains away as to why he is not lonely. However, the evidence seems to mount to us, the viewers, as the many variations on the question are asked.

Along with that, the footage that was chosen from a long period of following the man often seems to back up that thesis. In one scene Lagerfeld is shown affectionately patting a colleague's hand. The lady comments on how it hurts when he does that because of all of the rings he wears. In another scene Lagerfeld sits in a villa courtyard surrounded by bags of books that he has purchased on a trip. In the background there are people milling about. Lagerfeld, one of the most iconic figures on the planet, is framed in such a way so as to amplify that he is sitting alone with his bags of stuff. On the streets he is stopped on a walk every few steps by someone wanting to have their photograph taken with him. He graciously obliges and, after the photos, the people walk away looking at the picture on their cameras. Getting a collection together, he is filmed walking up the famous Chanel mirrored staircase alone, stepping on sketches to do so.

At the end of the film, I found I felt like I knew less about Karl Lagerfeld than when I started. I caught myself wondering what Christmas is like for Mr. Lagerfeld or what it's like when Mr. Lagerfeld has a head cold. But there is also an appropriate armor to the whole experience. I am not to know those things, nor should I really. I almost felt as if the point of the movie was to show me that I should enjoy the work of the artists I enjoy and leave off trying to know anything about people I will never get to know. I think there is a good lesson there. We know next to nothing about Shakespeare's life, yet his work is universal and we can all still enjoy it 500 years later. Why shouldn't that be true for contemporaries as well? Why should we always be so concerned over who made a thing?

Lagerfeld seems to have sort of an Epicurean Stoicism of a practical philosophy, with a dash of Existentialism. He is not a man of faith, nor a man to whom faith seems to hold any attraction. He speaks of his mother's constant frivolity along with Germanic arms' length, and I certainly saw the apple on the ground right next to that tree. His is a life of constant work and he has built an empire in which he is able to 1) create the art that he wants to create, 2) surround himself with the beauty he wants to surround himself with, and 3) allow himself as much time alone as he wants. He is constantly moving forward, chasing the dragon as it were, never looking back. There's almost a bit of the heavenly in that sort of forgetting, the sort of thing, I know from experience, I was looking for, and to some extent finding, in alcoholism. That sounds way more condemning than I mean it to sound. What I mean to say is that I feel like I totally understand the impulse to constantly look forward and forget what lays behind. Of course, his version is a lot more healthy as it is an active version: a constantly mutating vision. But I was rattled by how much I understood this part of it viscerally.

All of which I find compelling, and all of which mirrors some of my own more earthly desires. I think if I were not a man of faith, Mr. Lagerfeld's view would be about as good as it gets. Still, after the movie, Laurie was, I think, even more disturbed than I was by it. In talking with her about it, I mentioned that there is a figure in Christian theology who is known to have Beauty removed from Love. Again, I do not wish to pass any sort of judgment here. Aside from the trappings of the persona, I don't feel there's anything particularly Mephistophelean about Mr. Lagerfeld, at least no more so than any other figure in the fashion industry. He is, after all, just another human trying to live his life. I sincerely hope that he is very happy as he has brought a lot of beauty into this world. I admire his work tremendously. However, I find myself a little unnerved by what this suggests to me about beauty in and of itself. I am inclined toward the pat little axiom of Keats about how Truth is beauty and beauty truth. I am inclined, like Wilde, to advocate a sort of inherent goodness in beauty, a reflection of the divine delight in the aesthetically pleasing. But after watching this film, it makes me question a bit about what is a "good life." I think the answer is more of a question of balance. Even in the Platonic understanding, beauty is not one of the cardinal virtues. I do think that there is a goodness to beauty, however I feel that it is entirely limited to beauty. We foolish creatures always want to extend that value to other aspects, but it just is not so. Take it from a homely man.

Mr. Lagerfeld, especially in response to the sections regarding his mother, eschews analysis. In that sense we are almost the polar opposite. I believe in a life well examined. I am a passionate enthusiast of Freud and Jung. I also know that we all are beings created through a mixture of circumstance and will. We show what we choose to show and are fully capable of hiding what we choose to hide. It doesn't make things disappear to hide them. He says near the end of the film "I don't want to have reality in anyone's life because I don't want it in mine." I understand this completely and there is a level in which I can almost covet that kind of thinking. Reality is unspeakably awful, but I can't be a ghost. It's not enough for me.

A Few Notes on the Translation

2011-12-11T20:01:00.001-08:00

My preferred sort of libation bearers

I thought I might follow up on my post about Agamemnon by providing some examples of what I was talking about in regards to translations. As a quick aside, I would also like to encourage everyone, once again, to write letters to people that you admire and to do it immediately. In preparing for this post, I learned that Robert Fagles died only 4 years ago. I should liked to have written to him and thanked him for his work.

What I'm going to do is simply to show you three different translations of the first line of The Choephori (or The Libation Bearers.)

The first is the version used by Dr. Eliot in the Harvard Classics series. Do bear in mind that Dr. Eliot was assembling his series in 1910 and that we currently and constantly reap the benefits of an accelerated culture to the point of taking it for granted. I retain my charter membership in the Dr. Eliot Fan Club. The translation is by E.D.A. Morshead (Edmond Doidge Anderson Morshead in case you were wondering.) As a cute aside, Mr. Morshead was marked by his students to have a distinctly peculiar and eccentric upper-class accent which they called "Mushri" as if it were a different language. His students compiled a "Mushri to English" dictionary, nicknamed him "Mush", and, predictably, his classroom was called "The Mushroom." I think I would have liked Mr. Morshead. He was a fellow Classicist of a Liberal mind. He championed scientific advances as a Classicist, believing that reaching toward the highest aspirations of humankind is what the classics point to and what ought to be going on at any given time in a great society. He also made academic translations of classical literature which I find next to unreadable. Here is his opening lines of The Libation Bearers:

"Lord of the shades and patron of the realm that erst my father swayed, list now my prayer Hermes, and save me with thine aiding arm, Me who from banishment returning stand on this my country; lo, my foot is set on this grave-mound, and herald-like, as thou, once and again bid my father hear."

Doesn't exactly trip off the tongue and I have a difficult time imagining how to perform sentences like that in a way that would engage an audience.

Philip Vellacott translated the version I own, which is an older Penguin edition. Vellacott was of my great-grandparent's generation. He was a conscientious objecter to the Second World War, being a member of the Peace Pledge Union. The Peace Pledge was a document that members of that union signed which stated "I renounce war, and am therefore determined not to support any kind of war. I am also determined to work for the removal of all causes of war." I might get in trouble for saying this because it is largely considered the "just war," but I do have some admiration for the special courage it takes to make that kind of a stand. Although as another aside, I'm a little shaky on my enlistment criteria history, but he was around my age at the beginning of that war and I do have some doubts as to how much demand he would have been in anyway. I have a soft spot for conscientious objectors due to my Quakerism and due to my father's heroic (to me at least) conscientious objection to what I believe was the second most "unjust war" in my nation's history to date.

I will also include some of Professor Vellacott's obituary by Richard Luckett from The Independent in 1997: "In person he was slim, erect, quizzical and tenacious. He was a resolute walker, and a pianist of professional competence who knew the entire Art of Fugue by heart, if at a rather steady pace. He had Shakespeare virtually word for word. His sister Elisabeth is a distinguished artist, several of whose finest works he possessed."

I think I would have liked Mr. Vellacott as well. Here's a work by Elisabeth Vellacott called Evening Walk:

Philip Vellacott claimed that he got in a bit of trouble with the Classical establishment over positing that these works in particular were filled with political motivation. This seems to smack a bit of falsehood as Classical literature in his day was almost entirely composed of such theories and I feel that his translation may suffer a bit from putting forth theories, rather than to attempt to recreate the work itself. Also, he wrote a translation that was used widely for decades which is precisely the sort of thing that allows the Classical establishment to continue to exist.

Granted, that doesn't stop people within the Classical establishment from complaining about it. I am continually amazed by how low ratings almost all operas have on Netflix. Not because they are bad by any means, but rather because the opera fans are so devising, persnickety, and catty that not their favorite soprano or too many close ups means the opera gets a lower rating than Troll 2. This is really where I feel that Classicists cut their own throats in front of the rest of the world.

Philip Vellacott's version is an improvement over the Morshead to be sure, but still a bit clunky and wordy I thought. But infinitely more readable. Here, again, the opening line:

"Hermes, Guide of the dead men's souls below the earth, Son of Zeus the Deliverer, fill your father's office: Be my deliverer. Receive my prayer; fight in my cause. An exile newly returned to this my land, my home, I seek my native right. Over this mound, his tomb, before my deed is in hand, I call on my dead father to hear, to sanction."

I hope that my examples will make this needless to say, but I would read anything Robert Fagles translated. Fagles, as I mentioned before, is the most modern of the three and I feel that there is a lot of be said for constantly renewing the most accurate and most contemporary translation of a classical piece of literature, especially as our language continues to evolve so rapidly.

I recognized the name when I went to the library yesterday as the same translator who afforded a solution to a similar problem I had when reading The Odyssey a year or so ago. Fagles was a Princeton professor. His father died when he was 14 and it only just struck me that the very text I've pulled for this post is Orestes at the grave of his father.

He translated "The Big Three" of Classical Literature, being The Odyssey, The Iliad, and The Aeneid. In a New York Times interview concerning the latter he said, "It says that if you depart from the civilized, then you become a murderer... The poem can be read as an exhortation for us to behave ourselves, which is a horse of relevance that ought to be ridden.”

I was immediately struck by the clarity of his translation and instantly put aside any thought of reading any other version when I read his opening line:

"Hermes, lord of the dead, look down and guard the fathers' power. Be my saviour, I beg you, be my comrade now. I have come home to my own soil, an exile home at last, here at the mounded grave I call my father, Hear me, -I am crying out to you..."

I would also add that, of the three, I feel like this is the one that would play best on stage. The language provides opportunity to explore and convey the emotion involved and communicate said emotion to the audience clearly.

And, at the end of it, I feel like if one let's the stories speak for themselves, one can feel the rustle of the ages behind it. One can identify with the very human stories. But, like so much of life, the ground becomes richer the deeper you dig.

“I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all year.”

2011-12-09T12:48:00.000-08:00


Don't blink.

Last year, I embarked on a project sometime in very early December to post a "Christmas song that doesn't suck" on Facebook every day until Christmas. I remember that my self-imposed task became very difficult very quickly, but, in spite of remembering that difficulty, I had a few moments of toying with the idea of doing it again this year (I also toyed with the idea of posting Christmas songs that suck tremendously.) I came back across one of my favorite contemporary Christmas songs by Tim Minchin. I think it is one of the most beautiful Christmas songs I know. High on the short list anyway.

We live in an age where truth is both abundantly available and, largely, considered repulsive in polite company. The major blows to the human ego have long since been definitely dealt by Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud, precluding any further illusions of human specialness in ways beyond John Calvin's wildest dreams. Perhaps more germane to my point at hand, we are around 100 years into the portion of our history where medicine's reach in regards to physical human health is more helpful than hurtful. As a result, we have finally rocketed out of the period of human history where we mainly die from calamity and horrific disease to the period where we largely die of decay.

As most of you probably know, I work in elder care. I believe that, largely based on the fact of our collective medical condition that I've just mentioned coupled with our staggering procreative capacity, elder care is our immediate future. There is a coming tidal wave of need in that department, considering the mess of a health care and insurance industry we have in America and the Have Generations giving way to the Have Not Generations. What's past is prologue. There is a massive coming need.

One phenomenon I've observed in my work is that of rampant despair. I often find myself called upon by someone to explain to them why they are still alive and I'm afraid I don't have an answer to that question. I usually explain that I too am not exactly sure why I'm still alive a great deal of the time and given that the Almighty has fixed His canon 'gainst self-slaughter, ours is simply to persevere in the faith that there is a reason and enjoy what's left of the gift we've been given. Usually followed by suggesting an activity. There is nothing like an activity to dispel despair. I also mean to suggest that the qualitatively best application of that gift can be found in religion. A mix of the Epicurean and Kierkegaardian Existentialism to be sure, but that is the man that I seem to have become. That is where I find myself coming into this, my 34th Christmas. In other words, I am faced with the bald truth and am left with nothing else but to carry on.

The song is, of course, a highly personal one. Not everyone's family is a place where one feels safe. When I re-listened to this song this afternoon in what was probably at least in my second dozen times of hearing it, I was struck by the part where he speaks to his future daughter at ages 21 or 31. What specifically struck me was that those are around the ages in which it is reasonable to assume that one's mother, father, and possibly even grandparents will still be alive. I feel that all the more keenly as moment by moment I draw closer to the following decade.

Mr. Minchin is an atheist. I am not, although I talk about God's silence and absurdity and the void (and being freaked out by churches) with all of the faith of an atheist. As most of you know, I do, however, go in for ancient wisdom and feel that some tenacious ideas have survived out of worthiness while others not so much. One must needs evaluate them for one's self.

However, I am not responding to an atheist with the customary snide Christian attitude of having the market cornered on truth. I almost became an atheist a few years ago.

There is an Arthurian legend about the Fisher King which, like a lot of Arthurian legends, has a wide range of versions. One version is that there is a king who is wounded on the thighs or groin with a wound which will not heal. The king's land becomes a barren wasteland (symbolic of the wound and, I would add, where T.S. Eliot got the name for his masterpiece) and he is forced to fish for food. Parzival or Percival happens by on his quest for the Holy Grail. Percival fails to ask the Fisher King about his wound at the correct moment. That act of Christian charity, compassion, and concern would have healed the Fisher King of that very wound. Stories vary over the resolution (if any.) I was thinking about this story the other day and toying with the idea of a reinterpretation in which the wound came from Christianity, but was healed by Christ.

I was ardently religious in my late 20s and early 30s, but a little over two years ago I was first introduced to a contemporary movement in Christianity which is one of the most evil things I've ever heard of. I am fully convinced that that side of Christianity is destined to be as regrettable and as black of an eye to the face of Christ as the Crusades or the Inquisition or the witch hunts. I've written about it before and so won't rehash that part of it. I really needed to see Christianity oppose this evil, but instead found that a great deal of the Christian world either condoned and defended it, or simply ignored it.

At around the same time, my best friend died. It was sudden and he was not ill.

I reached a point, within the past year or so, where I asked myself if I could not believe. I found that I could not not believe. I was one of Pascal's "doomed to be a believer." Once I came to that realization, it was a relief, but a relief like how it was a relief to Kafka to get tuberculosis. I passed the point of no return, but I am still a product of the experiences which brought me past that point. The house had blown down, but I found that the foundation was still intact.

I also came to the realization that there are two ways to handle pain in this life. One is to arrange one's life in such a way so as to avoid that pain in the future at all costs. This is a decision born from a sort of informed fear. I'm not a big fan of fear. The other is to persevere in the face of future pain, to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them.

So, I have the religious side of Christmas to deal with too, but I am entirely sympatico with the sentiment of choosing to just enjoy it. I feel like so much of our culture is so jaded and ironic that one is shamed into not enjoying things like Christmas.

Which not to say that I feel that there is any war about Christmas in our culture aside from that between the tasteful and the gauche. My unsolicited advice to the alarm junkies, who are hoisting their own petard in perpetuating the nonsensical notion that there is, in fact, some sort of culture war involving Christmas, would be simply this: Then work to make Christmas something worth preserving in our culture. Your outrage ought not go to someone bidding a sincere "Happy Holidays." You should be outraged over stores pulling people away from the very hallowed day of Thanksgiving now with the temptation of bargains. I mean, is putting up a tree or a tawdry plastic light-up Nativity scene on a lawn so damned important that you'll let it stand in the way of fellowship and brotherhood? Over a day in remembrance of He who taught that loving your neighbor and God was the sum of the Law and told stories about loving Samaritans?!!?

Just because an idea is tenacious doesn't mean that it's worthy. A healthy society preserves that which is worth preserving. I certainly agree with the Socratic ideal that a good life is a virtuous life and I believe that can be applied to everything we participate in. In fact, I think it better had.

There is another point I would like to make about the Season as I wrap up. Laurie and I were reading Charles Hummel's Tyranny of the Urgent in which Mr. Hummel is struck to the core by a piece of ancient wisdom that a factory manager tells him. He said, "Your greatest danger is letting the urgent things crowd out the important."

I can assure you that, unless you're exceedingly creepy or haunted by a history riddled with "priors", you can walk into any assisted living facility, walk up to the activities director, and offer your services. It could be as little as a half an hour a week. You can sing, you can make crafts, you can write, you can have a book club, you can play games, you could even just read aloud to the residents. They would be thrilled and you would be a valued rarity. Why would I say that at this point? Well, as James wrote, "Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world." That's how you honor Christmas.

This Christmas I hope that you get to be surrounded by the people you love and who love you. I hope you have people who make you feel safe and I hope you can be surrounded by them. I wish you joyful memories that you can carry with you for the rest of your life. I pray that you can disregard all of the white noise.

Agamemnon

2011-12-08T13:00:00.001-08:00

I would like to start out by talking about the art of translation. The translation that I read was awful. What I tend to look for in a translation is 1) readability with minimal sacrificing of 2) the intended meaning of the original writers. Ideally, 3) also beautiful. That is why I am more likely to read, say, Robert Pinksy's translation of Dante's Inferno than one by an academic who is focused on accuracy. I look for the Apple Computers of translations. Elegant, user-friendly, without limiting one's options intellectually.

It might not surprise you to know that I have had friends so pedantic as to be anti-translated material. Their argument is that one is not reading, say, Aeschylus, but rather, in my case, one is reading the work of E.D.A. Morshead. I understand the argument, but that does not change the fact that I want to read Aeschylus. Also, barring one's self from reading anything translated from another language is barring one's self from an awful lot of great literature, as well as penning one in with the danger of ethnocentrism. But it is true that unless you're reading Oscar Wilde, chances are you are not going to read the actual literal words of the actual literal original author.

I tend toward thinking of translations as grey areas. Attempts at a completely literal, word for word translation from one language into English are sort of bi-path into communicating with someone to whom English is their second language (albeit, their mastery of the Queen's English is helplessly in the hands of a second party.) If we're talking about something like, say, The Message, which is a contemporary paraphrase of the Bible, I am willing to say that one is not really reading the Bible. But that is purely my opinion and being aware of the grey area of translation, it is hardly a hill I would choose to die on. In other words, I wouldn't read it, but I also wouldn't be so pompous and divisive as to tell someone who does that they are not really reading scripture. To make a long point short, I think it's important to know the issues and limitations inherent in reading translated works, and I think it is important to read them anyway. If anything, I think in a lot of ways it broadens the options presented to the reader of a work rather than limiting them.

All of which was unfortunate in this case. As with so many great works of antiquity, it is a rip-roaring good soap opera with buckets of blood. Lamentably, I spent a great deal of my time trying to figure out what they were talking about. I do not wish to brag, but I am an exceedingly intelligent man. It shouldn't have to be like that for me! There are other translations out there available to me and I don't feel compelled to limit myself to Dr. Eliot's choice in this instance (even though I am limiting myself to Dr. Eliot's overall choice for the next few years.)

So, here are a few thoughts, without writing any papers for the seemingly endless line of students who plagiarize my blog:
- We see in Clytemnestra's tempting of Agamemnon to walk on the red carpet a Hero With a Thousand Faces moment with echoes of The Fall in Genesis, right down to the similar results.
- Agamemnon is an enviable part. Much like Tartuffe, I kept imagining the actor having both the glory of being billed as the title character and a great deal of time to read backstage. I experienced that firsthand when I played in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado as the title character. You show up mooing about with Cassandra, you schlepp up the red carpet, and half an hour later you bellow "O! I am slain" from out your dressing room door. You'll be in the pub by 10.
- Sure, Aegisthus is squatting in Agamemnon's house and cuckolding him, but the apple didn't fall too far from the tree. Just ask Cassandra.
- Speaking of Cassandra, we have a divine invasion in the play. I can't decide if the power to see future events but not have anyone believe you until it's too late is a horrible thing or the best thing ever. I know what the play wants me to believe. And it doesn't end so well for her.
- Aside from failing the Bechdel Test, I have a difficult time with discerning Aeschylus' view of women. The two in this show are strong women, but not exactly positive role models. Actually, upon reflection, it is difficult for me to discern a protagonist in this piece aside from, arguably, The Chorus!
- The Chorus has a more solid Fourth Wall in this show than in some other Greek works. In fact, they are heavily emotionally invested in the action, to the point where they nearly take it upon themselves to effect justice.

I did enjoy the experience of reading this play, but, again, I am fairly certain I am going to seek out a more readable translation for the balance of The Oresteia.

The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis

2011-11-23T10:19:00.001-08:00

I kept thinking about etiquette books while reading this book, sort of "Rules for Proper Behavior Befitting Monks in the Middle Ages." Not in the "You shan't pick up your salad fork until the abbot tastes the dressing" sort of way. But more in the sense that it is exhortations and encouragements on how a Christian ought to live, where their mind ought to be focused, and the fruit to look for from said behavior. It is an exposition on proper human deportment in light of the Gospel. In spite of the vastly different age in which it was written, I felt that most of the lessons translate well to modern times.

As a quick side note, these 2011 eyes are continually surprised and delighted by Dr. Eliot's painstaking attention to cultivating the moral fiber of the readers of this series. In an age where testing, results, and a dermatillomaniacal attention to one's own navel have become the focus of Western education, I find this educational view inclining toward the goal of producing a society whose reigns are held by good human beings a refreshing view. Although refreshing like Frank Capra films, which always leave me melancholic over how far reality is from the optimism of what's flashing across the screen.

I would hasten to add that I feel that this book may not be for everyone. It was originally written for his fellow monastics in the early 15th century or thereabouts. There are a few passages, for instance instructions on giving the Eucharist, which will not apply to most of the blessed, contemporary, literate, chosen few. There are also passages which I found astonishingly Catholic (we are 1400 years into the evolution of the religion at this point.) Specifically, Purgatory makes a palpable appearance and the Eucharist is hinted at having spiritually meritorious effects. It was not exactly meant for the laity and certainly not for the Non-Christian. Not that I feel that it is any less of a great book. I am just uncertain that the book would have much practical application for those outside of the sphere of Christian belief. It is, after all, mainly a treatise on the effects of Christian doctrine on the thoughts and behaviors of the believer.

Indeed, much like Socrates (right down to phrases like "If you think that you know many things and have great learning, then know for certain that there are many more things you do not know"), some of the super-objective of the book seems to be an exploration on what exactly is a good life, that is to say a life well-lived.

Humility, anti-materialism, enduring temptations, immovable truth, refraining from judging others, choosing poverty, finding peace within as an act of peace toward the external world, patience, and even a rather Eastern argument for letting go of all desire in order to find enlightenment, are all covered. I look over that list and I think about so many contemporary issues we hear about daily at this particular junction in space-time. Corrupt and unfettered bankers leading directly to peaceful, angelic youths being pepper-sprayed. Foreclosures, unemployment, rampant debt, while the cake-eaters come into our homes through our standard-issue lighted squawk-boxes to make millions off of 72 day long marriages and tell people frantic about not being able to get a job to "get a job." A culture of polarization, the decay of civility, the death of compromise, all heralding economic collapse. Rage over the disproportions in the distribution of wealth. All of which I feel could be addressed by some of the service based (read: Slave Morality) behavior encouraged in this book. The message is not "there'll be pie in the sky when you die" but rather "love one another" and, perhaps more to the point, "If when you do good and suffer for it you endure, this is a gracious thing in the sight of God. For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps."

I would also like to say that I found the voice of the author to be pleasant and humble. I liked Thomas à Kempis quite a bit. He lived a very quiet life and it shows in his writing.

Upon reflection, I may dial back my earlier statement about recommended audiences. I would recommend that every Christian run, not walk, to the nearest location of a copy of this book accessible to them if they haven't had the pleasure of reading it yet. Every Christian ought to read this book. But I also feel like the book will, at the very least, provide occasion for a great deal of thought and self-assessment for anyone. I also put forth without reservation that the life outlined in this book is "the good life."

Christmas Wish List 2011

2011-11-17T09:57:00.001-08:00

After many exhortations and prompts and cues from my mother, today I publish my Christmas wish list for this year.

1. Bad As Me- by Tom Waits: I still don't have the new Tom Waits album. Life has a way of getting away from me.

2. The Journals of Spalding Gray: As soon as I learned this book existed, I knew I must own it. From about ages 15 through 26ish, if asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, my stock answer was "the next Spalding Gray."

3. The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton: Laurie and I have been fascinated by the existence of this book and are amazed that we don't already own it. It's not as grim as the title might suggestion, but rather a book of medical theory from the early 1600s. Reviews lead me to believe that the New York Review Book Classics edition is the one to get.

4. a bicycle- I plan on riding to my new job, which is in biking distance. I shall become all lean and lissom and no longer sweat while I eat. You'll hardly know me.

5. Last and certainly not least: The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick- A book which I've waited over a decade to see the light of day.

I should probably also add that Laurie very much wants me to get a laptop and I am not objecting to the suggestion.

Speaking of bigger ticket items, I also wouldn't turn down a Kindle.

Or the entire Harvard Classics Library.

I thank you for your attention.
Ta and bisous!

15 Things To Do In This Life

2011-11-11T11:34:00.001-08:00

My friend Megan asked, out of the blue, on Twitter the other day to tell her 15 things we, her followers, should like to do in our lifetime so as not to be the martyred slaves of time. Much like New Year's Resolutions, she mentioned how clicking off a "bucket list" seems kind of horrible and, I would add, might leave one at the end feeling a bit like Alexander (weeping over the dearth of worlds left to conquer at almost precisely my own age, by the way.)

So, I thought it might be an interesting thought experiment to explore what sprung to mind in my own skull. I find it interesting that so few of my choices revolved around things having little to do with virtue per se. Rather than that pointing to a bad direction, I found it indicative of moving in directions in my personal life that speak to a life being well lived. These are "frosting." I am fairly content with the current state of my life and the seeming future direction thereof.

A few words on do-ability: my experience has been that the experiment mutates rapidly. So much of my biography has shifted in ways I never would have imagined. I consider nothing on this list outside of the realm of possibility and, as is so often true in life, may offer a few of those much needed fences in further life choices.

But, enough. On with the list.

1. Visit India- I have a deep love for India and its people. I think it is a beautiful culture. I also have friends I should very much like to see. This was an easy #1 choice for me.

2. Attend the Bayreuth Festival- The Mecca for Wagnerites. Wagner himself supervised the design and construction of the theater. To see a Ring Cycle at Bayreuth would be near to one of the peak experiences possible for me on this planet.

3. Tour the Vatican- As an art lover, a theology and church history student, and an aesthete, I would love to tour the Vatican. I know Laurie would too.

4. See one of my plays produced- Strictly speaking, this has already happened, but not in a profit making environment and only with a one-man show. I would love to have the play I am currently writing be produced by a professional theater company.

5. Finish the Harvard Classics Library- which will happen if I simply live long enough to make it through. I am working on it. I would hazard a guess that I still have years in front of me to go, but if Augustine didn't stall the project, nothing shall.

6. Meet @stephenfry - One of my living heroes and, I think, one of the more fascinating people alive.

7. Also would like to visit Athens- Having already trod the streets where Shakespeare, Wilde, and countless others had trod, I can only imagine the hallowed feeling of the truly ancient beneath one's feet.

8. Master Greek and Latin- I don't know about mastering, but this is another project that I am working on. I am currently at a very stumbly level of Latin. Laurie and I plan on learning Greek together one of these days. She has some experience in that classic language. I have none. One of these days we will take it up.

9. Create a mixed drink- Wouldn't it be fun to have a signature drink? Or having a dessert or sandwich named after one's self? Maybe it's gauche to think so, but I think it would be a hoot!

10. Have a poem of mine in the Norton Anthology- Yes, I'll admit vestigial and highly unlikely wishes to join the immortals of literature.

11. Name a star or asteroid after Laurie- While there is no permanence in this universe, I have plans to buy a high-powered telescope when Ezekiel gets a little older to take out into the wild and look out at the wonder of the macro. I would love to be able to find Laurie Mathers in the heavens. In case you haven't guess by now, I am a silly and romantic marshmallow of a man.

12. Have a rose garden- We should always have roses.

13. Own an Irish Wolfhound- Such majestic canines! I am drawn to their temperament as well as their stunning presence.

14. Reconcile with everyone- Life is short. The Living are just the Dead on vacation. People should live gently and be quick to forgive.

15. Die before Dementia- Ending on a characteristically dark note, my vocation has taught me the horror of Dementia/Alzheimer's. It is an awful disease and I should like to go without experiencing it firsthand. I encourage everyone to get informed about it and, where they can, search and see if there is some place in the world where they can improve life for another.

Chronicle Books' Happy Haul-idays Contest

2011-11-08T10:56:00.000-08:00

As you may remember from last year, Chronicle Books hosted one of the more exciting contests of the holiday season. They are hosting an even more enhanced version of the contest this year. If one has a blog, one posts on that blog $500 worth of items they would like from the Chronicle Books catalog. One fortunate blogger who does so shall win their wish list! One commenter on that blog entry also wins the blogger in question's list as well (see, you're in this too. All you have to do is comment on this post to have a chance to win the $500 worth of books I am about to list.) Apparently I get to choose which commenter wins, so dress nice for your user photo.

This year, they've added an additional winner: the charity/library of your choice. The charity gets to choose their own $500 worth (which is probably wise. While I love my library, I'm not sure they would share my first choices.) My choice for a charity is, most likely not surprisingly, the Chico Public Library. I love the Chico Library, spend a great deal of my free time there, and worry about them in these days of rampant defunding. I should like to be the champion of lending libraries whenever I can.

And so, here is my Chronicle Books wish list for this year. I am trying not to simply duplicate last years list and, in fact, this year we have a grandchild coming in December, which opens a Narnian wardrobe door of interest in children's literature for me.

As a side note, I have provided links to the Chronicle Books page on each of the listings. I usually like to zazz these kind of posts up a bit with photos of the items in question, but I'm having a devil of a time with blogger today. So, please do check out the books in question. Don't just take my word for it that they look lovely.

1. Dante's Divine Comedy- Illustrated
Boxed Set
By Sandow Birk,and Marcus Sanders
$100.00

Be that as it may, I start with the book set in their catalog that I still covet one year later. A beautiful adaptation that proves that Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot are not the last two humans to have read the second two volumes of the Divine Comedy.

2. MoMA: My Museum-
$19.99

Little Ezekiel will need to learn about modern art and begin making his own.

3. The Domaine Chandon Cookbook
Recipes from étoile Restaurant
By Jeff Morgan,Photographs by France Ruffenach
$40.00

Epicurean cookbooks orbiting around wine are some of my favorite things.

4. Nests
Fifty Nests and the Birds that Built Them
By Sharon Beals
$29.95

This looks to be an absolutely gorgeous photography book. I would add that it is also a beautiful idea for a photography book.

5. Bixology
Cocktails, Culture, and a Guide to the Good Life
By Eve O'Neill,and Doug "Bix" Biederbeck,Photographs by Sheri Giblin
$16.95

Oh dear me, who doesn't love a charming mixology book, filled with guideposts for the bon vivant. I have an alley. You will find this book right up it.

6. Andy Warhol's Colors
By Susan Goldman Rubin
$6.99

This is how I would choose to teach a small child about color.

7. My Milk Toof
The Adventures of ickle and Lardee
By Inhae Lee
$15.95

A book from a delightful and creative blog that I have enjoyed for some time now. It is a charming "photo-comic" series.

8. The Architectural Detail
By Edward R. Ford
$40.00

A work on what a "detail" is in architecture, which rather reminds me of the long discussions I've had over what "an action" is in acting.

9. Le Corbusier, Homme de Lettres
By M. Christine Boyer
$70.00

A book about one of the most fascinating people in recent history and a major force in the world of architecture.

10. Edie: Girl on Fire
By Melissa Painter,and David Weisman
$29.95

Edie Sedgwick is, to me, one of the most captivating figures of the 20th century.

11. The Vatican and Saint Peter's Basilica of Rome
By Paul Letarouilly
$125.00

Oh my goodness, I can't tell you how much Laurie and I would love to have this book in our home!

So, there you go! Comment away for your chance to win this list along with me! And thank you to Chronicle Books!

Watch Laurie interview me about what I am reading.

2011-11-06T14:22:00.001-08:00

The Confessions of St. Augustine

2011-10-26T17:17:00.000-07:00

This was by far the book that took me longest to read in this series so far and also almost as long as any book I can remember. Walden took me a few months as well, but that was because I loathed Thoreau. I found a lot to love about St. Augustine, but it was still a long haul.

This morning to Laurie I likened it to the first time I saw Casablanca. I think I was about 18 at the time, and I had heard so often what a great film it was, one of the best ever made, by many people whose opinions I trusted on such matters. I then saw the film and thought, "Huh. I don't get it. It was just an average 1940s noirish film, the likes of which I've seen dozens of times." It was a revisit years later, viewed with the benefit of a modicum of maturity, in which I realized the perfection encapsulated in that film as well as it being the source and inspiration of so much other great material in popular culture. I realized in reading St. Augustine that I had been reading St. Augustine for years, although through the filter of many other minds, some of which may not have even realized the wellspring of their thought. He is so ingrained in my religious path and in our culture as to possess the attributes of invisibility and postulation. Indeed, much like reading Dante and Milton, I came to understand how much of reality has been formed by this man's thinking. I came to understand through my reading that he served to mold a great deal of Christianity, and this wasn't even City of God.

Before I go any further, I should probably elaborate on what specifically I found. Augustine came out of the Gnostic religious path called Manichaeism. Manichaeism was a Gnostic religion and was, in fact, one of the most popular religious paths of the day. It followed the teachings of the Persian Gnostic Mani. Augustine reacted very strongly against Manichaeism after his conversion and there is an argument one can make about perhaps going a bit beyond the call of duty with his objections.

I am inclined to agree with Augustine's rejection of the Gnostic sort of "salvation through knowledge, learning, or wisdom." I might suggest that Augustine's rather severe doctrine of Hell might stem both from coming out of dualism and also a reaction to the "ebb and flow" view of good and evil in Manichaeism. But, to be honest with my own reaction, I also have to lay my Annihilationist cards on the table. I would also mention at this point Augustine's admitted heavy influence by the writings of Plato (a heavy influence which I share), with the specific intention of recalling my reaction to Socrates' view of the afterlife and how much it resembles the popular Christian view of Hell (which was, in essence, Augustine's as well. Yeah, I said it.)

I should probably also state that I am not saying that Augustine formed early Christianity in his own image, rather that he monkeyed with the hues a bit.

As for the difficulty with the text itself, I find it difficult to express why it took me four months to read 300 pages (except that I was also reading other things in the meantime including Proust and the Diaries of Andy Warhol.) Augustine did have a cyclical style of writing, possibly a translation glitch, which ground me down a bit. I also found myself disagreeing with the man, again more in matters of hues than with specific points. At the risk of an ad hominem explanation and speaking as one who sets up camp in the grey area of radical grace which often gives off the appearance of antinomianism, Augustine could and did smack a bit of the Pharisaical at times. He also made a few moves that made me uncomfortable. I thought his expulsion of his mistress (and mother of his son) was a bit callous. Still, being faced with such moments gave occasion to check my judgmentalism, so there may have been some profitable humility exercises to be mined from the work. Although I would hasten to add that it wasn't that I didn't like Augustine as a person. I liked him quite a bit. I just suspect that he would have grossly disliked me.

The biographical section was the easier part of the text. The real challenge came in the last three Books where Augustine mainly talked around and about Creation. This could also be a bit excruciating to me at times, especially as one who has no problem reconciling contemporary science with his religious path. For example, Augustine talked about time for what seemed like an eternity, and his pre-Einsteinian, pre-quantum, heck, pre-Newtonian and pre-Copernican view of time and the universe I found to be some of the most challenging wading of the entire project.

Of course, there was a lot to love about Augustine as well. His early but solid Trinitarian view I found quite lovely and engaging. I especially loved how his expressions were so steeped in scripture. He spends a great deal of his work "praying the scriptures" to God. His example in that regard may have been one of the greatest lessons I gained from reading Augustine.

Would I recommend Augustine? Do I think Dr. Eliot was correct in including the work in this series? I would recommend it with a few provisos. I would not recommend it to a non-Christian, nor would I recommend it to the sort of young zealous types who are captivated by The Law. I would recommend it as an important work in Christian history. It was an exceptionally challenging read and clearly one of the most influential works in Christian history, ranking it high as one of the most influential works in human civilization. I would speculate that this was Dr. Eliot's reasoning. I, however, was more joyful back when I was basking in William Penn.

Dream Roles, Types, and Drama Lit 101

2011-10-18T12:23:00.000-07:00

“A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.”

-Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

One of the better features of the internet culture is the abreviated, expedited interaction with people one admires but who live in high castles. When I was growing up, there were these things called fan letters which were wonderful. You would write your thoughts out on paper and send it by post to the person you admired. The person would eventually read the note and possible send a response or at least they would sign one that their assistant wrote. Or have their assistant use the stamp with their signature. You would hear the stories of famous people corresponding with normals like the gods descending Olympus to mess with the humans.

I've always felt that it is a good thing to write to people who one admires. First of all, it's nice to tell people that you admire them and explain why. You are a better person for being the type of person who takes the time to actually do that. It is its own reward, but it is also nice to have a response. On the internet, such interactions are usually far more brief and less substantial, which is why I am still an ardent advocate for the dying art of letter writing. But I will also say that on the internet, in my experience, such interactions are more commonplace than trying to wring a letter from a celebrity.

Still, in the past week I've had two such brushes with people I admire, one of which inspired this blog post with a call for inspiration. Naturally, I follow fashion icon Michael Kors on Twitter and the other morning he asked what music people were listening to that morning. I responded "I opened Spotify, typed "Sondheim" into the search bar, put it on random, and am letting it play all morning." Mr. Kors expressed that he loved that response.

Heartened by approbation from so revered a source, I've been listening to a lot of Sondheim over the past few days. I adore Sondheim and it always reminds me of my first love: the theater. I majored in Theater in college with the intention of becoming a playwright. That didn't happen (or, rather, it may happen while I have another job throughout my life or happen after I'm dead) but the exchange and subsequent music reminded me of dream roles.

I think anyone who has been on stage has probably had roles which they would love to play. I imagine it has something to do with appreciation for the art and point of view which the character expresses. I am increasingly aware that I am on the far end of the portion of my life in which I could play The Dane (although there are still arguments to be made from the text for my potential in that role. I submit to you Gertrude's reaction to Hamlet's early poor performance in the fencing match: "He's fat, and scant of breath." I know! Sounds just like me, right?!!?) In about 20 years, I would love to play both Falstaff and Lear.

But I could talk about the history of theater and my favorite roles for... well, I imagine I could start a whole separate blog on that topic (I should like to ask Emily Post how many blogs are too many for one person. Perhaps I'll just pop down to the Underworld for a moment and see... Okay. No more blogs for me.)

So, as brevity is the soul of wit, let's get back to Sondheim, I was never cast in leads. I was always the slightly dark, slightly mad character who comes in at a point in the show and spices up the narrative, then leaves. I think I may be too dark for Pseudolus or The Baker but too light for Sweeney Todd or anyone in Assassins. My body reflects my fondness for the taste of hops too much to ever be cast as Seurat.

One of my favorite works by Sondheim is one of his less performed. He wrote a musical based on/rebooting The Frogs by Aristophanes. In the original, Dionysus descends into Hades to bring back the world's greatest playwright, Euripides, to the world of the living to solve the problems of modern life but, after a battle of wits between two dead playwrights, decides to bring back Aeschylus instead. In Sondheim's, Dionysus descends into Hades to bring back the world's greatest playwright, Shaw, to the world of the living to solve the problems of modern life but, after a battle of wits between two dead playwrights, decides to bring back Shakespeare instead. It is a wonderful play and if you've never seen it or heard the music from it before, I advise you to seek it out with all speed. Someday I would love to play Pluto. He has a number which is rip-roaring fun even while posing some serious philosophical and theological questions. How ought we live and why? What's stopping us? What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of afterlife?:

As a final thought in what's turning out to be a buckshot blog post topically speaking, I am rather chomping at the bit to get through the early Christian writing in the Harvard Classics because next is a volume of ancient Greek drama.

Plays are some of my favorite forms of literature to read. Much like poetry, they allow the reader to engage in the literary conversation so deeply. One gets to build the sets, cast the characters, and play all of the parts within one's own mind, free from any budgetary restraints. More importantly, one also gets to interact with the ideas expressed in the script, imagining ways to interpret, express, and possibly even subvert the material.

As a man whose dream life is that of a playwright and a man who is working toward a lively posthumous career as one, I encourage everyone to read more plays.

True Story

2011-10-07T20:41:00.000-07:00

I had an unusual form of disappointment this afternoon. On my lunch break, I caught a few moments of a local NPR show called Nancy's Bookshelf. Nancy Wiegman interviews authors who either live in the area (usually having written things like The Conifers of Bidwell Park) or who are passing through (authors who are squeezing in an extra book tour stop between Sacramento and Portland.)

This week's guest was Professor Jonathan Steinberg who has written a 600 page biography of Otto von Bismark. It is not a subject I would normally have pursued left to my own devices, but the author was passionately informative during the interview and I love furthering my education. In short, he really sold it, at least as far as I was concerned. Then came the point in the interview where Nancy asked Professor Steinberg what brought him to Chico and he replied that he was here to do a book signing. I suddenly became very excited realizing that I had off this evening. I rushed home to Google the details of the time and place of the book signing, only to find that the interview had been recorded in April. It was as though the radio said, "Hey, Paul, here's something you really would have enjoyed but missed a long time ago on account of not knowing it was going to happen."

But that's not really what I came here to write about. I came to write about a thought experiment sparked by a comment from Professor Steinberg on the Genesis of his biography. He said that he was approached and asked who he would write a biography about had he the opportunity. He instantly responded "Bismark" who seems to have been a figure of some fascination for him throughout his life. The difference between me and the professor is that he then went on to be permitted to write a biography which was published by a major publishing house with the expected admirable remuneration for such an effort.

The hypothetical in my mind and kicked around at our dinner table this evening is "How would I respond were I asked that question?" My initial immediate response was "Glenn Gould" although it strikes me that there are already an awful lot of books available on that subject. Which lead me to think about biography in general.

My experiences with biography have given occasion to note the vast array of types and styles of biography. Some are highly academic, some are highly popular (both of which I've found can turn off readers if they oscillate too far in either direction.) Some raise the subject to heroic, godlike proportions while others are nothing more than character assassinations (again, both of which blah blahdy blah.) Some offer a unique perspective from the biographer (longtime readers of this blog will remember my review of Detmar Blow's biography of his wife Isabella Blow.)

Some of the more sucessful and engaging focus on a specific attribute. I recall a wonderful biography of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec which posited the thesis that Lautrec's work was highly political in spite of our modern perception of it being all dancing girls and circuses. Some other successful biographies I've found focus on a figure involved in a notable historical instance, but who for one reason or another have not been in the forefront enough to have previously thought to merit a whole biography. I remember being highly moved by a biography of Lord Alfred Douglas.

Another form of biography I enjoy depends on the skill and verisimilitude of the author. That is to say when a biographer seeks to explore a figure in history about whom we know very little. I have a whole shelf in the other room devoted to such books about William Shakespeare. I thought perhaps I would like to write a biography of Socrates.

And there are the great tomes which become widely viewed as "The Authoritative." One of my favorites is one which perfectly balances the academic with readability. Michael Schumacher wrote an 800 page stepstool of a biography about poet Allen Ginsberg called Dharma Lion which is among the most enriching experiences I have ever had in reading a biography. I cannot recommend it highly enough. The only criticism I could possibly imagine to level against it is that it was written before the subject died and therefore leaves off the inevitable ending to all true stories.

Occasionally, but worthy of making the distinction, there also comes along "The One To Read" which can differ from "The Authoritative" or not. The obvious example is James Gleick's incomparable biography of Richard Feynman, simply and appropriately titled Genius. I do make the distinction because there are so many books by, about, and surrounding Feynman that are must reads. This is the one that you buy a case of and hand out to everyone you know.

As Plutarch wrote, "To be ignorant of the lives of the most celebrated men of antiquity is to continue in a state of childhood all our days." The impulse to read biography or historical accounts seems to stem from the human urge of seeking wisdom, learning from lessons that others have learned, and an attempt to glean the well-spring of greatness (or, in some cases, the cautionary tales) contained within the life of a world-historical figure. Therefore, I feel that there is a sort of nobility and, indeed, hope in the popularity of biography.

As a fun diversion, how would you answer that question given the offer to research and pen a biography?

Oh, and by the way, you can listen to the full interview with Professor Steinberg here.

Digging Deeper

2011-10-05T16:32:00.000-07:00

I've just had the most remarkable experience which may be difficult to express the enormity in simple words and pictures. I was driving home from a weekend trip to pick some things up at my place of work. I work in a neighboring town and I normally commute to it by means of a highway that runs through orchards of some kind (I'm not even sure what they are growing but I do know that almonds are a very common crop in our area.) Most of my commute looks like this:

And I am usually driving with either the time constraint of clocking in or the time constraint of wanting to get home. Today, as Laurie was teaching a class, I had no such time constraints and I remembered my friend Matt Raley telling me about the River Road. While living in that neighboring town, he would often have occasion to drive to the town in which I live, and he told me that he would sometimes take the River Road. It served no practical purpose and, in fact, added time to the trip, but it boasts a stunning view and takes you right by the Sacramento River. I was told that it makes a sort of loop from Highway 32 back to Highway 32 after a time. Which, upon arriving home, I found a map on http://www.chicovelo.org to illustrate:

I had no idea how it worked at the time, but when I saw the sign on 32, I turned. First of all, it is a country road, which meant that I had the road to myself (even to the point where I could stop and take photographs.) Second, it would wind around and there would be these startling spots of something simple, lovely, but unexpected coming into view:

Unfortunately, I was unable to take photos at the majestic Sacramento River. There was also the moment of exhilaration at realizing that I was only half convinced that I would be able to find my way back home and the subsequent delight of reaching familiar landmarks.

So often in life I find that simple acts of re-examining the ordinary through different perspectives to be some of the most rewarding and joyful acts in life. Anticipating life continuing in a similar vein for some time, I have the option of taking a different path now and seeing entirely different views. But even if I choose not to at the end of a long day, now as I drive I shall at least know that that is there.

Bouts-Rimés project poem the third: Christopher

2011-09-27T10:31:00.000-07:00

My friend Christopher sent me several eclectic lists of rhymes for my Bouts-Rimés project. I decided to do something a little different. Rather than choose one list, I cobbled together a few of the lists to create three sets of four rhymes and a final set of two, which as far as I know is not an established form, but rather feels like one.

What emerged was a set of words which, to me, seemed to paint a span of time and space. A few languages and one specific dead city suggested themselves. Initially I thought of a person who had been alive far longer than a human ought to be, but when it came time to put pen to paper (which, believe it or not, I always actually do in the poem writing process. I don't know why. It just feels more written to me when I do that.) I found a rare love poem coming out of me, in some repressive, ragamuffin world.

I feel that the end result is one of my stranger efforts, but I found the creative process to be highly satisfying with this one.

The Reach
by Paul Mathers

She and I were a digraph.
Leaving 'twas my life's great gaffe.
All action since, not much chaff.
Like Tantalus or a giraffe,
I reach back to those days in Edo.
We kept our love so incognito.
Her grandson called me 'abuelito.'
Oh, those scornful looks from Padrecito.
He caused all hospitableness to pickle.
Goaded the gossip's ears to tickle.
This sailor's dollars weren't worth a nickle.
We lived off tossed out pumpernickle.
I fled by night on my tricycle.
Was ever love so farcical?

Podcast Roundup!

2011-09-18T17:33:00.000-07:00

Here is yet another look at some of the exciting podcasts I have recently discovered. As usual, all of the podcasts mentioned are available on iTunes:

APM's Dinner Party Download- The Dinner Party Download is the pinnacle of slick, hip, and urban American Public Media. I, myself, am about as urban as they come. I recall a recent dinner party where three of the other gentlemen were remarking on the trend of survivalism, which is to say people going into the wilderness with nothing but a mustache cup and a compass, and remarking that I think I would shrivel up and die after two days without my French Press coffee maker.

But I digress. The Dinner Party Download claims to be a guide for people to "win" their next dinner party. The format starts with an "icebreaker" (in other words, a joke), small talk (an offbeat or interesting news story from the preceding week which probably did not get the attention of most), cocktails (which takes a "This Date In History" event and applies a drink recipe to it), and a short interview with a famous person or something like that. It ends with an eclectic song to listen to on the way to or on the way back from the party.

My only issue with the podcast previously (I understand that it's très gauche to complain about free entertainment, so don't take this too seriously) was the length. Having a long commute, there is a slight annoyance in listening to a podcast less than 20 minutes. However, I am given to understand that they intend to expand the podcast to closer to an hour starting with the next installment. So, this is a great time to jump onboard.

In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg- My recent discovery of this program was like tapping into an ocean. It has years of backlog and it is an intense experience. One way I've described it is that it is to Stuff You Should Know what a steak dinner with mashed potatoes and asparagus is to a Payday candy bar (both will give you protein, but one is far more nourishing.)

In essence, Melvyn has assembled a panel of some of the smartest humans on the planet to talk about a subject. They will talk about anything in the human experience. They will talk about things like Abelard and Heloise or Sparta or rhetoric or happiness and what function it serves and so forth. It really is like an autodidact graduate degree. Along with that, you have to pay VERY close attention to what they are talking about because they do not slow down and the labyrinthine lines of conversation often lead away from the topic. Bragg has a sort of genius for being able to discern when this has happened and shepherd the talk back to the question at hand.

I cannot recommend this podcast highly enough. I will spend a very long time catching up on it, but those who know me probably realize that I like the sensation of being hit by a tidal wave, not knowing where it shall take me.

The White House audio- Some may consider this sort of a cheat, but it has recently come to my attention that one of the most prolific podcasters on iTunes is President Obama. The White House podcasts not only every speech given by the president (which is a daily occurance) but also every cultural event held at the White House (I recently downloaded a whole Blind Boys of Alabama concert from this source.)

While having mixed feelings about our current president (as I've had for all previous presidents), so often I have found in life that one gets a fuller and more accurate picture of information by going to the source. We get so much of our news from highly edited, often highly opinionated sources. I like to hear the man speak for himself.

Also, I find the daily download painting a very different picture of my nation than the one so often presented me. First of all, a ridiculous amount of the president's job is public speaking. Second, in the midst of the soundbites about "passing this jobs bill," we miss the president decorating a soldier who showed tremendous courage in the course of duty. I feel that this skewed focus robs me of some of my awareness of the beauty of America.

Time simply does not permit me to listen to every speech that Mr. Obama makes, especially with Melvyn Bragg turning my head. But I find this to be a valuable and informative resource, a glimpse into the inner workings of our government, and, I would add, yet another service of our government available for our use.

A Tour of My Office

2011-09-11T19:53:00.000-07:00

Subvestment Investments

2011-09-11T14:45:00.000-07:00

We are embarking on yet another project which has been a long time coming. I am of the school of thought that clothes, largely, make the man in so much as that people believe what they see (including the person wearing the clothes.) I also feel that a male dressing nicely is a counter-cultural act in this day. We live in the age of the t-shirt. I should like to be one vote for a more beautiful world. I think I reflect that in my interests. I feel it is high time I attempt to reflect that in my appearance as well.

I've lived for some time now with a scattershot wardrobe. A good deal of it remains from my college years in which I too was a jeans and t-shirt man. I have a few articles for more formal occasions as the need has arisen over the past decade. I have a few articles from my intense working out period in which I needed to buy smaller clothes. They remain in my closet as a testimony that I do retain some capacity for optimism.

So, a lot of the time I find myself dressed like this:

Which shows a light spirit and isn't quite so Death In Venice as continuing to wear band t-shirts into my mid-30s. But, as I've said before, Jeeves is my spirit animal and I know what my inner Jeeves thinks when I dress in this manner.

Ideally, I would like to wear a suit at any time in which I am not in pajamas with possibly a few articles for gardening or hiking. I would like to unleash my inner dandy. But how does one get from Comic Con to the Literary Establishment? How does one get from dress of the students in the ivy covered lecture hall to the dress of they who stand at the lecturn?

I know that throwing piles of cash around is one answer, but I am hardly in a position to effect that outcome. However, just because one is of limited means is not an excuse for allowing one's surroundings to go to pot. One can brighten any corner of the world that they are given with a bit of care and attention to loveliness. My marriage to Laurie has largely broadened me in this way. Before we were married, I understood this concept, but lived like "the crazy used bookseller" which is to say amidst stacks of books with paths to the kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom. Laurie and I both value the house beautiful. Laurie just happens to be the one in our pair with the tools to bring that value into realization.

I am learning though.

My road to this shift started very young. There was a high school chum of mine who always wore a suit and tie and I've always thought that there was a wisdom in that. He had a seriousness without sacrificing the natural rebellion of the adolescent (although he came at it in a very fresh way.) One can wear a suit anywhere and the idea of being dressed appropriately for any situation appeals to me. This has been in the back of my mind for decades.

Right on the heels of my discovery of the musical genre known as chap-hop (see example below),

Laurie discovered an online television show which has rather turned my head. It's called Put This On, with the subheading "A Web Series About Dressing Like A Grownup." It was not so subtle of a hint, but certainly one which I was completely primed to run with. I think Laurie's words were "it's time for you to start geeking out on all the right things."

Of course, there has also been the influence of our fashion blog. I wasn't wired to watch nine hours of Austin Scarlett without coming away with a desire to dress better. I think our field trip to the designer end of South Coast Plaza this past July also got my sartorial salivary glands watering.

Inspired by the webseries, I went out and got the book Dressing The Man by Alan Flusser, which deals with what he refers to as "permanent fashion." Mr. Flusser teaches on gaining the look of "seasoned simplicity," the emergence of the peacock in the previous century (beginning with the ubiquitous suits up to the second World War, to the rigid conformity demanded by the era of the grey flannel suit, through the 1960s gift of personal expression in dress, to the modern man of style), by mainly giving instruction on the foundation of understanding proper color and proportion.

Hopefully arming myself with these lessons, I am about to embark on a journey. I was recently telling Laurie about my spiritual path and the shattered remains thereof. I told her that it was as if I knew what I was supposed to do, but I wasn't doing it. Likewise, or perhaps as a reflection of same, I intend to now become the man that I intend to be inside and out. More on this soon.

Bouts-Rimés project: Poem the Second: Poem Girl

2011-09-06T14:39:00.000-07:00

Poem Girl left a charming list of rhyme in response to my call for help with this Bouts-Rimés project and I hoped to do it justice with a retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. If you're not familiar with the myth, here's the dumbshow, a lovely little shadow puppet student project adaptation I found on Youtube:

Or you can read the story for yourself here. You'll notice that the original ends rather more brutally than this shadow play. Or, better yet, seek out one of the hundred or so operas based on this myth.

Mythology is a rich source of material for the arts and the Greeks contributions have abided for good reasons. They strike at universals. Here we have love, loss, death, art, and in one act a major lesson in faith. So here now is my modest contribution to the grand tradition of retelling the Orpheus myth:

Sight Regained
by Paul Mathers

I remember my song of her grace
and her anguished connubial face
when the Underworld stretched out its lace,
drew her to the Erinyes' mace.
So I forfeir my rights in this race
to the banks of the dead gave my chase.
At Persephone's feet made my case,
Calliope's inheritance my ace,
I was called upon my steps back to trace,
return from existence's base.
As I turned, Hades claimed my embrace
and my flower returned to his vase.
Now through savage woodlands I pace.
In severance, returned to my place.

Let's All Write Bouts-rimés: Poem the First- The Ardingers

2011-08-31T11:58:00.000-07:00

As I said before, Bouts-rimés is a collaborative form in which one gets a series of rhymes from another person and crafts a poem from them. Alexandre Dumas, père, compiled a whole book from famous poets of the day with the same set of rhymes. It can be both a delightful and extremely tricky form.

I am finding a natural tendency toward poems for a precocious but dark child.

I sent out the call to my readers for a set of rhymes and found myself crippled by the choices. I instead have chosen to do all of them. Here is the first in the series from the set of rhymes sent by my good friends The Ardingers :

The Dissolute's Dirge
by Paul Mathers

My liver I keep in a sog
for my pneuma's in a bit of a bog,
a condition that circumstance fathered,
to ammend it I shan't be bothered.
Existence is best viewed through fog
to keep horrors from filling your log.
Savoir faire one can glean from my story:
Be the amaurotic in the observatory.
For in a world where the dog eats the dog,
I would sooner make camp with the frog
who on trifles and pests will grow fatter
and not give a rip towards the matter.
So exhausting the state of agog.
To the alehouse for a measure of grog!

August was a drag

2011-08-31T11:40:00.000-07:00

Something that may not be abundantly clear to readers of this blog is the great mass of cobbled together neuroses which comprise Paul Mathers.

I was thinking about my hypochondria last night and how it's actually worse to be aware of my own hypochondria because I have one track running that says "I think I'm getting sick" while another plays simultaneously which says "But I always think that. But is this the time it's for real or am I just doing it again?" Which is like the magic shell on the scoop of ice cream which is my constant illness panic, a scoop which is in amongst one of those sundaes where you win free t-shirts for your whole family if you can eat it in one sitting.

In short, I'm a bit of a mess.

This past month has been a mammoth case of the mulligrubs for me. I have every intention of resurrecting this September. I am not seeking to make excuses or elicit sympathy. Just stating the fact.

Out of the ashes comes the muffled cackle of the phoenix. I give my solemn pledge as a doctor of divinity to be more consistent in my blog posting. The good news is that I've crawled out from behind the couch and picked up pen to finally begin composing the long promised Bouts-rimés project of which I took on a Herculean amount. I shall begin to post them at (hopefully) regular intervals starting immediately after I finish writing this post.

Thank you to the people I am supposing exist for your understanding. Life does have a way of slipping through one's fingers. As does love, empires, and mercury.

Some Quick Housekeeping

2011-08-07T19:18:00.000-07:00

1) The bouts-rimés poems are coming. Patience please. I did no writing over our vacation. I am self-imposing a deadline of the end of next weekend since I've chosen 5 poems to write. They are coming.

2) Please do check out Laurie and my new blogging project. It is barking mad. We are discussing existence through the filter of watching every episode ever made of Project Runway. If you like what I do here, you will very likely enjoy it. You may also enjoy it if you feel otherwise.
http://runawayprojectrunwayproject.blogspot.com/

Fin de Vacances

2011-08-01T16:57:00.000-07:00

So it goes. Jiggity jog and so forth.

I feel as if I've turned a corner this week. More soon.

Days 7 & 8: Pastime With Good Company

2011-07-31T18:31:00.000-07:00

It took one week before people told me that I looked relaxed. I slept for most of Friday, got up, went out to the armchair, and fell back to sleep with a book on my lap that I had intended to read.

Laurie's friends, and my new friends (hereafter shall be known as "our friends"), Robin and David had invited us to dine with them at Primitivo Wine Bistro in Venice, CA. Past the line of gourmet food trucks, Primitivo is a chic little tapas restaurant (the bacon wrapped medjool dates were transcendent.) I am given to understand that it has been over 25 years since Laurie and Robin had seen one another, so, in a sense, we were all catching one another up with a lifetime.

We rose early on Saturday and drove to the South Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts. A high school chum of Laurie's is the proprietor of the acclaimed Watts Coffee House. Gathered were six or so friends. The conversation was lively and delightful. The food was some of the best of the entire trip. I had chicken sausage, lightly spiced, eggs which I doused with the Louisiana Rooster Sauce provided at each table, and waffles. The waffles did not need butter. We tarried, enjoying the food and company, well beyond the time in which the establishment closed.

The Backhaus Dance Company was formed in the early 2000s by a handful of dancers who went to Chapman University at the same time as I. I knew several of them and The Facebook has been ablaze for the past several weeks with news of their recital from other friends from my graduating class. The preeminent New York dance venue Joyce SoHo has numbered the Backhaus Dance Company as one of the seven emerging North American dance companies to watch. Needless to say, I had been eagerly anticipating taking in their performance for some time.

And the performance exceeded our expectations. It was a wonderful night of dance, very smartly infused with commentary and choreographic exposition by Jennifer Backhaus. These interludes served to draw us deeper into the performances and, much like the brilliant decision to have the dancers warm up to the performance onstage in full view of the audience from the moment the doors opened, gave a tour of the clockwork behind such a performance. I especially remembered their Disintegration piece which, if memory serves, was performed at the Kennedy Center back when I lived down here (and which I believe I saw in a student recital.) The Pink Martini piece Love and Other Impossibilites was delightful. Capping the evening, however, was their new piece (performed by long term members of the company, rather than Backhaus Dance Intensive graduates who, I think, comprised the other pieces) Duet(s). We were stunned by the perfectly bridled mastery and emotion of the piece. It was a meditation on love, the accompanying pain, separation, and I would go so far as to say what it is to be human, all expressed in dance.

Oh, guess what. God bless the internet, because here the entire piece is on Vimeo!

http://vimeo.com/26395085

If you ever have the chance to see their work, do everything in your power to see them.

As a personal aside, the performance took place in the Waltmar Theater which used to house Shakespeare Orange County. I spent hundreds of hours in that theater in my 20s. Of supreme sentimental value to me, when I went upstairs to use the restroom, I saw the doorway to a room which housed props and leads to the catwalk far above the audience. I used to live there, occasionally literally.

It was a week of epiphanies. Boy oh boy, I miss the theater.

Day 6: At The Getty

2011-07-31T12:02:00.000-07:00

One rainy morning in 1777, a fifty year old man walked into the parlor of a lush, opulent, and one might daresay stately home in Chesterfield. It had been a long, rainy journey from London and the man worried about a slight tickle that was gnawing at the back of his throat, developing into a sniffle. He began to set up his canvas.

The Count walked bruskly into the room with a train of men, functionaries of the Royal Society (the so-called "Invisible College") precariously holding stacks of papers in their arms, one or two trying to direct the Count's attention to the matter they found important. The Count's eyes locked onto the painter and said, "Ah, so you made it through the deluge, Gainsborough. Very good. You're early. Anne shall be down when she's finished with her morning prayers."

Thomas did not look up from his work. He lifted the nine foot tall canvas and placed it between two grips which he tightened. "I thank you, sir. I shall be ready."

The Count cleared his throat and continued out of the room, his retinue in tow.

Thomas thought briefly about Johann Christian, the composer's son, whose portrait he'd recently completed. Such a warm and intelligent man, so earnest and devout, salt of the Earth. He thought of Mary and dear Margaret so patiently posing for him with his gamble, his promise to them that once he was satisfied with his exhibit for the Royal Academy they would all quit the city and their life with galling deference to the vapid upper-classes. No more of setting ruddy old tool merchant's children posing in lavish blue suits for a few week's worth of rent and pub money. They would retire to the country, buy a modest cottage. Thomas thought of that dip in the road, about 20 miles south on his way up, that fell into a dark, wooded valley, with mottled sunlight speckling the dark brown, moist leaves. For the rest of his life, he would remember whenever life became difficult that that place existed somewhere.

In July of 2011, Paul Mathers walked into a room in an art gallery in Los Angeles and saw the Portrait of Anne, Countess of Chesterfield by Thomas Gainsborough. His first thought on reading the plaque was of a verse from a Noël Coward song about the stately homes of England and their tendency to house portraits by Gainsborough. He also thought of how this was painted when his nation was but a fledgling making it's first unsteady trip out of the nest and how Gainsborough, as a patriotic Englishman (with somewhat of an American view towards social class), probably did not have a favorable view of the colonists revolting for tax purposes. He also thought that where he was standing was Junipero Serra country in those days, almost as far removed from all of that as Paul Mathers in 2011.

The plaque mentioned Gainsborough's frustration with his great and immediately recognized talent for portraiture and his desire for a pastoral life of painting pastoral scenes. Paul thought of poor Franz Schubert who thought his great talent was as an operatic composer but, indeed, was actually in everything but that. He thought of J. Paul Getty's own description of art collectors as those who have all of the eye and love of beauty of an artist, but lack the skill to create their own artwork. And, indeed, Paul thought of Paul.

He sat in front of the grand canvas on the sort of round red ottoman provided by the museum in the middle of each of their major rooms. He found it to be stunningly beautiful, the fast dashes of oil resolving into a gorgeous portrait of a graceful young lady when one stood a good six feet away from it. He wondered about the young lady in the portrait, a hint of mad, instant love tugging at his heart, and resolved to see if he could find any biographical information on the subject, perhaps for a blog entry. He thought about his life, wondered what it's going to amount to in the end. A group of five young college students walked into the room and stood between him and the canvas, blocking his view.

Laurie and I took far too many pictures at the Getty Center to post here, but I did make a photo album of them on Facebook. You can find it here:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150275228202340.354007.519217339&l=63f40fa096&type=1

Days 4 & 5: Bijou, Bijou!

2011-07-29T15:00:00.000-07:00

Laurie and I spent a day shopping. Window antiquing mainly. Above is a photograph I surreptitiously snapped in the yard of an antique complex in the city of Orange. I was especially interested in the castle doors. I joked that we could replace the entire front of our house with them.

Naturally, we went used booking as well. Picked up a copy of Collector's Choice:The Chronicle of an Artistic Odyssey through Europe by Ethel LeVane & J. Paul Getty. It's a biographical (and, in parts, autobiographical) account of Getty's art collecting. The section I'm reading right now reminds me quite a bit of Rudolf Bing's account of his years with the New York Metropolitan Opera House, 5,000 Nights At The Opera, especially the accounts of John Christie's Glyndebourne and how problematic the political climate around the second world war made operating in the world of the arts, especially those arts historically dominated by the Germanic and Italian. Laurie purchased a few books on the Inquisition.

Next to the bookshop was an indoor reptilian zoological garden.

Then to Downtown Orange and the many antique stores thereabouts. Laurie and I window shop here in the same way we did at South Coast Plaza, which is to say with an eye toward sparking creative ideas that we might create on our own budget. Outside of George Antiques I saw that a simpatico graffito scribe had also passed those hallowed byways.

The next day I spent with my father. He took me to the LA County Fire Dispatch complex where he works and I was given a grand tour. The building sits on shock absorbers, rather than any traditional foundation, which are able to withstand at least an 8.5 earthquake. I was taken to the basement where I was able to see them (photography in such an environment, however, seemed like it would be frowned upon, so I refrained from asking.) The dispatch room looks like something out of an action film and, indeed, I am told has recently undergone a $4 million renovation. LA County is, in my estimation, in very good hands. I was honored to find that my father has two of my paintings in his office.

We then went to the movies, which is something both of us, in our respective lives, rarely ever gets to do. We saw a satirical film about a super-hero in World War II. It starred Stanley Tucci and Toby Jones. Or, at least, it did for me. My father came out of it having seen a film about motorcycles.

That night we went out to dinner with members of Laurie's family. A splendid time was had by all. We tried (and failed) to get to bed early as the next day was our day at the Getty Museum. More soon!

Day 3: Other Temples, Other Gods

2011-07-26T20:39:00.000-07:00

Among the copious ways in which I am similar to Truman Capote is that I have both a side that has seen some of the truly horrible things that happen on this little blue rock in cold, uncaring space, and a side which is dazzled by the beautiful, the lovely, what others sometimes call the frivolous. Having a strong inclination (if not talent) toward the visual arts, I enjoy stuffing my eyes, as it were, with things that are lovely in hopes that the lovely is what will come spilling out of me.

Also, try as I might, I am incapable of not loving beautiful things. It is in my hard-wiring, deep in my imprinting, woven into my fabric.

There is a place in Costa Mesa called South Coast Plaza. It used to be structured in such a way that, while no one was physically prohibited from going anywhere in the shopping area, one half of the building was designed and occupied in such a way that people without a consistent disposable $500,000 would likely feel more comfortable avoiding that side of the plaza. I assume it's my Quaker "don't doff your hat to any fellow human" streak that gives me the mutant ability to travel freely in that area in spite of my economic handicap. On this visit I noticed that the high end fashion has creeped around the corner of the plaza from where it used to be relegated. At first I chalked this up to the poor economy and conditions where the middle is erased but high discount items and high luxury items continue to thrive (just as the middle-class disappears). But then I realized that South Coast Plaza has actually built a separate building to house the more "baseball cap" stores. It has become a capsule for that insulated world of la belle vie.

Personally, the haute couture section of the plaza is a bit of a comfort place for me. In times of high stress, I literally have dreams about the Chanel store. I think it's because my times visiting that place have been much like visiting a museum.

When I go to the Getty Museum on Thursday, I do not expect someone to give me a Toulouse-Lautrec because some curator sees how much I am able to appreciate the work. Nor do I expect for someone buying an Armani suit to instead decide to use the money to pay off one of my mortgages. Of course, I understand the arguments against the avaricious culture of conspicuous consumption. However, I think I also understand deep in the dark parts of my brain that thinking something shouldn't exist just because I cannot have it is another form of avarice, wrapped in envy, and painted like righteous indignation.

And so, I enjoyed an afternoon of looking at extremely beautiful objects. I enjoyed it tremendously. Then we went home.

We also enjoyed dinner with my grandmother at a splendid Cuban restaurant.

And that was the third day of our vacation.

The First 48: Rendering Unto Caesar, Rendering Unto God

2011-07-25T11:20:00.000-07:00

For those who don't know, we are on vacation in Southern California. Please do not burglarize our house.

While we've seized the opportunity for extra rest and nourishment, we have also turned our eyes to a different sort of nourishment, which is to say that which comes from forming future memories and broadening one's experience. Our first night in Orange County found us at Shakespeare Orange County. Indeed, we actually planned our trip with seeing their production of The Tragedy of Julius Caesar in mind. It was a marvelous production. The cast was, without exception, superb and they breathed lightning and thunder into the words of The Bard. I would especially note John Walcutt who played Cassius. Not usually a piece that I associate with this sort of reaction, his performance of the speeches imploring Brutus to join in the murder plot were so beautifully played that I was moved to tears. I cannot recommend SOC enough. If you ever have a chance to see one of their performances, let nothing stand in your way.

I also was able to see my old friend and Shakespearean mentor Tom Bradac. Naturally, we were unable to bring back any photos of the event, but here are Laurie and I on our way to the show.

We were invited by our friend Cynthia to attend church with her on Sunday morning at Saddleback Church, which, for those of you who don't know, is the church of Rick Warren, the pastor who (among many other things) gave the prayer at President Obama's inauguration. I think I'm being only mildly hyperbolic in saying that the church is about the size of Chico both in acreage and population.

I have something I do so often in life which I've recently come to describe as Warhol-esque tourism. It came from a handful of Andy Warhol quotes (i.e."I think everybody should like everybody" and "I've never met a person I couldn't call a beauty") and applying them more broadly to institutions and ideas. I also tend to take a lot of photographs. It came from realizing my own natural propensity, and that of the world around me, to dislike things. I do not wish to be a person marked by his capacity to dislike things (quite the opposite, in fact). Put simply, I like to keep an open mind inclined toward liking things.

There are a lot of people who dislike Pastor Warren's ministry (and, clearly, a large number who do like his ministry.) They have their reasons (which I have heard at the usual nauseating protractedness that marks the speech of the hater. Please restrain yourself from telling me why I'm wrong in how I reacted to my personal experience.) I came with an open mind and was delighted.

Here's me in front of the children's ministry building, complete with didactic playsets.

We were in the "Gospel tent." There are apparently several sites on the campus to accommodate different worship music tastes. Sheila E, she of The Glamorous Life fame, was a featured performer. She looked fantastic and the music was excellent.

Both Laurie and I found the sermon edifying. Afterward, Cynthia took us on a tour of the campus.

I noticed two things about the demographic of the congregation. I shall be blunt and state that so often I've found that the majority of church congregants, in our post-Christian age, tend to be the elderly, the infirm, the marginalized, or young couples with children seeking to raise their progeny with some religious foundation in hopes of inspiring character and what not. The spiritual needs and wounds are immediate and at the forefront of the mind of the congregants. Sort of a spiritual Naked Lunch atmosphere.

At Saddleback there was a great deal of wonderful and heartening racial diversity. The people (in general) seemed prosperous and in the prime of life. They wore nice, well-crafted clothes and exuded an air of physical health. I remarked to Laurie that so often these are the people who are not attending religious ceremonies because they have the illusion of safety in their lives, but that they are a group who ought to be reached spiritually because everyone is one cancer diagnosis or car accident away from needing spiritual comfort. And, needless to say, we are all dying. It is a church tailored perfectly for Orange County's needs.

Apparently, Pastor Warren took a large survey of non-church attenders, before organizing this church, and asked why they do not attend church. The results lead to a great deal of the choices made in the organization of the church. I would also hasten to add that the church is thriving, and I do not simply mean in numbers. There seemed to me to be an abundance of earnest Christians, the outreach for a first time visitor was nothing short of astonishing, and the multitude of ministry opportunities were manifold. They even had a youth building made with painstaking attention to environmental standards.

Also, I found the entire campus to be quite beautiful. In short, it was a lovely visit and a memory which Laurie and I shall treasure greatly.

Also, there was an aquarium.

A Cry For Help and Another Contest!

2011-07-16T11:39:00.001-07:00

Friends, I need your help. My next poetry writing entry is Bouts-Rimés. As you well know, this form is when the poet uses rhymes provided by someone else. Here's where you come in: give me a list of 14 rhyming words and I shall compose a poem using the rhymed words from the list I like best.

As an added incentive, whoever provides the winning list (the list that I choose) will get a free copy of Death in Venice by Thomas Mann and a handwritten, signed copy of the poem (which will sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars if you happen to still be alive 100 years after I'm dead!)

So, friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your rhymes!

Let's All Write A Blues Poem!

2011-07-14T14:36:00.000-07:00

We have now reached one of the forms that absolutely terrifies me. It seems like embarrassing myself is an inevitability here. It's not that I don't like "the blues." I think it's a beautiful form of music that serves as an outlet for a certain type of basic human anguish.

Our textbook offers a quote from Ralph Ellison which I think expresses the spirit of the blues. He said that the blues "at once express the agony of life and the possibility of conquering it through sheer toughness of spirit."

I am going to sit this form out on making a video of myself reading an example poem aloud for two reasons. The first is that the thought of me reading the blues strikes me as going beyond absurd and nearing the realm of the disrespectful. I am that far from a credible blues man as you shall see anon (or, as you can see by how I finished that sentence out of the abundance of my heart.) The second is that I feel that this form would be better served by giving an example in the musical form. Here's Leadbelly:

But we also want to include an example in the form of poetry. When one looks to the form of Blues Poems, one could not find a better place than the works of Langston Hughes. Hughes was one of the golden children of the Harlem Renaissance and wrote a great deal of blues poetry.

Morning After
by Langston Hughes

I was so sick last night I
Didn’t hardly know my mind.
So sick last night I
Didn’t know my mind.
I drunk some bad licker that
Almost made me blind.

Had a dream last night I
Thought I was in hell.
I drempt last night I
Thought I was in hell.
Woke up and looked around me—
Babe, your mouth was open like a well.

I said, Baby! Baby!
Please don’t snore so loud.
Baby! Please!
Please don’t snore so loud.
You jest a little bit o’ woman but you
Sound like a great big crowd.

Ok. So, I'm going to take that as a permission slip from Langston Hughes to use humor in my blues poem. I've decided that I must needs go meta with my piece. I am also borrowing from the first stanza from a joke blues poem I posted on Facebook.

The Paul Mathers Style Blues
by Paul Mathers

Oh, I looked in my cupboard this morning
I was out of Earl Grey tea.
I made Kadota Fig Tarts
and the Pinot Grigio wasn't chilled properly.
O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew.
I'm just a nebbish who's feeling devilish,
I've got the Paul Mathers style blues.

Well, I'm a raging neurotic.
I've got my ennui down.
My existential dread
is known all over town.
I read the German philosophers
and tend to agree with their views.
But my poetic cathexis compels me to employ this form,
I've got the Paul Mathers style blues.

The blues, it isn't in me.
I'd rather talk interior design.
The pedant in me recoils
from how I used too many beats in a line.
I've bumbled up this form poem.
I'll never be a Langston Hughes.
And that's why I'm a'wailin'
"I've got them Paul Mathers style blues!"

A Few Thoughts After A Few Days of Google+

2011-07-11T11:06:00.000-07:00

I almost had an anxiety attack while setting up my Google+ account. I've been on Facebook for a long time and I find, to steal a line from Tom Lehrer, that Google+ is so simple that only a child can do it. I thought I might post some of the pros and cons that I'm already feeling from Google+

Pro:

Every photo I've ever uploaded via a Google platform is immediately available on Google+.
I can actually identify my step-kids as family (major failure, Facebook!)
It seems to be moving toward a conglomerate internet experience. I am sensing cobbled together elements of Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and those sharey sites like Reddit or Tumblr and so forth.

Con:

Extraordinarily baroque. It's like getting a stereo with an intricate graphic equalizer and no clue how to use it.
Very few people are on it whereas most of human life is on Facebook.
Starting work on building my own internet conglomerate experience isn't practical for me. I want it to be done for me, which is why I don't understand why people keep telling me that Google+ is intuitive. If it's so blasted intuitive, why is there so much I have to do to set it up? Those sites I listed in the pro- column which I said Google+ seems to be employing (or exploiting) elements of, I never needed a single article to explain to me how to get started on any of those sites. I've read at least five to try to figure out Google+. In short, I don't have time for this.

Currently, in my experience, most of what's going on on Google+ is people discussing how Google+ works. I suppose that is as natural as my neophobia, but I would add that both point to something gang agley.

There are elements that defy pros and cons like the access to one's Picasa account. I had a personal Picasa account once, long long ago, and I used it liberally until I filled it up to the point where I would have to start paying for more. At which point I forgot that the thing even existed until I logged on to Google+ and found pictures of Laurie and I with vastly different haircuts than our current ones. Then I apparently had Picasa accounts associated with my Blogger accounts (unawares) which do contain some more recent pictures of me, but mainly contain pictures of covers of books that I was writing about in a specific entry (images which I gravely doubt having a legitimate claim to any right to use.) Facebook, on the other hand, contains many recent pictures of me that I've uploaded one by one over the past few years. It is a Rome that I've built over time. Now I'm being called upon to build a new one and I find the prospect unattractive.

Also, and I know I'm being difficult, but I can't tell you how much I wished when I first logged on that there was a tool by which I could find which of my Facebook friends are on Google+.

I also wish to say a few words about Circles. The advent of Circles has taught me something that I like about what Facebook has done to me that I didn't even realize it was doing. Facebook is a place where I have a couple hundred people watching and I write messages to them, share videos with them, and photos from my personal life. The person I present in those messages is, I hope, the person that I am.

In life, so often I have found that I am at my worst when I say things to one group of people that I wouldn't want others to hear. I don't want to speak behind people's back by any means. People who know me know that I am politically to the Left and religiously towards Quakerism, and while I do have issues that I feel passionately about, I love people who I know are neither of those things. So I seek to tailor myself to incline towards that love rather than stroking my own self-righteousness. That love I have for those people is the reason I am there in the first place and not just off in some corner reading a book. In a way, Facebook's limited capacity to limit one's viewers within one's peer group demands a certain amount of integrity on the part of the user.

Mainly I talk about literature and tea.

However, I am not seeking to damn Circles (ten bucks says someone has already categorized their friends into Dante's nine infernal circles.) As with any technology, it is not the technology, it is those who wield it who decide how it will be applied. I remember the old accusation that Twitter is vapid, to which I always say, "Try following @stephenfry or @alaindebotton." I could see Circles working very well in a situation like a book reading group.

I am admittedly middle-brow as far as internet culture goes. I have the natural interest when some shiny new gee-gaw shows up, I get an account, I see if it's going to enrich my life. I refuse to sacrifice an ounce of my quality of life on the altar of new technology. I have a sense that Google+ may end up only appealing to a certain type.

To borrow a gimmick from The Motley Fool: Buy, Sell, or Hold Google+? I would say Hold at this point. Hold until the platform is rolled out in full for the general public and watch for the first few weeks. The moment it seems to be crashing under its own weight (like, oh say, a Wave?): Sell. My primary concern is that I am only marginally internet savvy in a purely utilitarian way. For anyone less internet savvy than I, Google+ seems to be totally perplexing.

My own plan is to have the account that I have, let it sit there, and see if it catches on. If it does, I can swoop back into my account and play. If it doesn't, I'll let it go like putting an opossum in an unsealed Tupperware storage container and letting to drift out to sea, making a lot of noise and commotion, signifying nothing.

Divers and Sundry Minutae

2011-07-07T13:24:00.000-07:00

So, Gina returned from points far Eastern (Republic of Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova, et al) with red wine and dark chocolate, craving Mexican food. We are delighted to have her back. Her arrival did occasion a few changes in our lives, all, I think, for the better.

We finally closed down the used book business. For newer readers of this blog, for the past 8 or 9 years I have run a used book business, primarily online. For about 5 of those years (the bachelor ones) it was my sole source of income. Like all of life, it was subject to external mutations. Economic tides mixed with advances in technology mixed with increasingly greedy seller's fees on the part of the online selling venues mixed with our total inability to have anything to do with maintaining new inventory and repricing due to having real jobs finally came to the crossroads where the business was very nearly only managing to tread water each month. I had a liquidation garage sale this past weekend. While the sale did make more money in one day than the business had lately been making in a month, I still have a garage full of used books. So, there are more blow-out sales to come with even more severely reduced prices in hopes of getting our garage back.

Laurie had been driving Gina's car while Gina was out of the country, so we also had the issue of transportation to deal with. We bought the Volvo pictured above two days ago. We are a little nervous because it was far too cheap, but it seems to run fine and they didn't impound it as a stolen vehicle when we registered it, so we've decided to adopt the narrative that we stumbled upon a great deal. Now all that remains is to get the Grizzly Reaper to mow my old truck. I like Volvos because of their reputation as safe cars. I can't tell you have often, while whizzing around in automobiles, I become hyper-aware of being propelled in tons of metal with other tons of metal also whizzing around. I am such a fragile 200-some-pound sack of meat in a world where so many others walk freely while mad, high, drunk, insane, unlicensed, despairing, all able to get behind the wheel of automobiles and hurl themselves around the planet. I like the idea of my wife being in a car known for surviving accidents well.

Other than that, I still hack away at the script I'm writing. I've moved on to rereading Truman Capote's Music for Chameleons. Caught with a bad case of the mean reds, I still have set St. Augustine aside on a shelf, looking on dourly. There is a niggling voice in the back of my head that knows that I have to return to and finish his Confessions. I will not let Augustine derail my reading project, although the reward system I've promised myself for getting through his work will even further extend that reading project. More on that soon, but needless to say, my recent Summer Reading post is turning out to be as outrageously inaccurate as New Year's resolutions and astrological forecasts.

Also, we're going to by grandparents this December by way of my step-son Tony.

Also, we are going on vacation soon.

Also, for those who were worried, the fuchsia is doing well.

Summer Reading Update- A Surprise Upset

2011-06-26T18:41:00.000-07:00

So, there's been an amendment to my summer reading list. I am now anticipating getting through only one or two of the Harvard Classics titles this summer and it's not because I've found anything more interesting that I would rather be reading. It is very rare that I will put aside a book and very rare that I will take a hiatus on a reading project. St. Augustine has done it.

It doesn't help that everyone I talk to confirms my feelings. "Like trying to eat a sweater", "dour", "self-flaggelation masking self-induglence", "great only in short quotes" are some of the phrases people around me who have also read St. Augustine have said in the past week as I aired my frustration. I suppose it also doesn't help that I'm just coming out of the past year where I feel that I am to religion what Timothy Treadwell was to grizzly bears. And it furthermore does not help that I am assured by reliable sources that reading the next title in the series, one by Thomas à Kempis, is a similar reading experience.

I always think this time is going to be different with me reading great works of Christian literature, but then I always end up fleeing back to dark, bleak Germanic philosophers. I worry about what that says about me. It fills me with ennui and makes me feel so disconnected from the world... wait, I'm doing it again, aren't I?

First of all, I have experienced no discernible edification from having read Augustine. I am halfway through and while I can empathize with a few experiences that he relates and it did give me a reason to go study up on Manicheanism, I am otherwise at a loss for any take-away. Maybe the pay-off is coming, but I am assured that it is not. Second, it is one of the rare times in my life when a book has completely taken the steam out of my reading habits. I sit refreshing Facebook while Augustine is on the shelf next to me. It's terrible and something must be done.

I will continue with and finish the Harvard Classics series. I am determined that I will make it through this series or die trying. But I have decided to take Augustine in very small bites (perhaps a few pages a day.) I have also decided to get my groove back with one of my favorite books, which is Death in Venice by Thomas Mann. It's a book that Mann described as being about the "voluptuousness of doom." It is a wonderful book about human nature, aging, love, beauty, truth, mortality, fear, and propriety. It is a joy to read and I would recommend it to anyone. In fact, after I closed my used book business, I kept all of the copies of it to give away like some twisted version of the Gideons.

So, there's my turgid little announcement. Thank you for letting me vent.

Ta!

Let's All Write Some Blank Verse!

2011-06-20T13:37:00.000-07:00

Blank verse is one of those emergent forms that pushed a change in consciousness to some extent. Of course, the percentage of the world aware of the emergence of blank verse in English language poetry was (and I daresay remains) relatively small, but the effects were far-reaching and abiding. Prior to the mid-1500s, people expected poetry to rhyme. As I mentioned in my Paradise Lost post, Milton famously had to include a preface to the original edition defending and explaining the blank verse contained within.

You know, I've been thinking about our own accelerated culture and this particular advance in Western thought to see if I could come up with a parallel. I contend that in my lifetime I have witnessed a similar shift in cinematography. Over 20 years ago, a camera that shook or ran or focused oddly was considered poor camera work. In my lifetime I've watched the lo-fi revolution of camera work in places like Homicide: Life on the Street or famously The Blair Witch Project or more recently Cloverfield. I quickly noticed other (arguably lesser) works in arts and entertainment adopting the style. It's sort of the style of the POV of someone who has just run down the block and into the room where the action is taking place, focusing where they can, but also attempting to catch their breath. Very effective in drawing the audience into the dramatic tension. Which saves on hiring good actors I suppose. But what leads me to make the comparison is the accusation, which I heard leveled by critics against all three of those pieces I mentioned, that the movement of the camera will make an audience member vomit. I am not hearing a lot of reports of people vomiting while watching this sort of camera work. We've been inoculated by these early pieces employing those techniques.

Blank verse usually had five major stresses or emphases in each line. I usually struggle with not translating that to mean "syllables" in my mind. The lines, as I've said, did not end in rhyme. This is one of those forms that intimidate me, much like Brahms experienced in writing his symphonies, because of the heavyweights who mastered the form so early on. I speak now of William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe. They gave the form wings.

Speaking of poor camera work, Laurie was at work when I recorded this, so it is extraordinarily grainy, there is no movement of the camera, I stand in the doorway to my office, and you get to see me push the stop button at the end. The piece is from Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe. It is Faustus' lament over his impending damnation.

As for my own piece in this form, I thought I would tend toward the dramatic in a hat doff to those magnificent Elizabethan playwrights. I think I've mentioned before that I am currently working on writing my third play. So often I find it to be the case that one of the many manifestations of distractions in the creative process comes in the form of coming up with other, possibly more immediately attractive ideas while you're still trying to write the thing that you are currently writing. I already have an idea for my fourth play. I seem to write about the tragedy of ubiquitous marginalization in our society and while the one I'm currently working on is filled with kinetic action, the next one is looking more like a dialogue driven play.

So, as a thought-experiment and a bit of preparatory work, I thought I would write a monologue from that fourth play (which doesn't yet exist outside of my brain.) I thought about setting up the monologue, but I think I'll leave the content up to your imagination. I find it best to keep creative cards close to my chest up until the first draft is completed. But this is a monologue that the middle aged, working class intellectual, married, neurotic Andre (me) is giving to the character of Evren, with all of her problems and neurosis, in an attempt to encourage the younger character through a time of great tribulation in her life. We shan't get into specifics at this time. You can find out more by waiting a year or so until I write it (and, hopefully needless to say, the actual play shall not be written in blank verse.) This is what I've come up with:

Discerning an emerging narrative,
I offer some unsolicited advice.
I doubt what I have to say will be new,
But I feel that encouragement is always healthy.
This life is so lonely, harsh and brief.
I should like to always tread kindly.

My own hometown is full of horrid memories.
They are pieces of my own biography
over which I had no control.
Being at the helm of my own life now,
I have no intention of allowing them
to comprise the self that has mutated.

The self is like unto interior design.
It is a job which is never complete.
Even after death we continue to grow.
If one can mine joy from self-creation,
it is a joy that cannot be taken from one
in the darkest prison nor splendid palace.
They cannot touch inside our minds, Evren.
Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.

The Eternal Seductiveness of Life

2011-06-15T15:43:00.000-07:00

It's been nearly half a decade that we've owned this house. One of the greatest pleasures and, in my opinion, arguments for home-ownership (now that we've collectively scuttled the "good investment" aspect) is the ability to garden. Before we purchased this house, I spent many years with little pots and flowerboxes in windows of rented space. Now I have an entire yard.

We have a mandarin tree, lavender, geraniums, hydrangeas, a whiskey barrel of mint, one of cilantro, a tulip tree, an olive tree, an evergreen, and several oaks which were planted haphazardly by squirrels. We are very fond of flora and I find gardening to be one of life's great pleasures in which the divine is reflected in our toils.

But for years I've wanted fuchsia. My grandmother has a profuse fuschia bush next to her home in Orange County. It's been there for as long as I can remember (I would wager it's been there longer than I would be able to remember) and I've sort of imagined always having that particular flower in my life as a floral motif. They are so vivid and such a lovely color combination. But we've tried several times to transplant a cutting from my grandmother, only to arrive home (after a 9 hour drive) with a dead branch.

Tomorrow (perhaps apropos in also being Bloomsday) is Laurie and my 4 year anniversary and I finally decided to bring home a healthy pot of fuchsia in hopes of cultivating it into a mainstay in our yard. Being a tropical plant, I worry a bit about the cold winters although I am given to understand that fuchsia has been known to flourish (as it were) as far north as England and regenerate after the harsh winters.

We shall see. It is currently planted in a hanging pot on our front porch. Wish me luck.

Summer Reading 2011

2011-06-08T12:23:00.000-07:00

Taking a cue from my virtual friend Mixtapes and Cupcakes, I thought I might do a post about summer reading (now that the weather and the calendar seem to have finally come to a consensus.) Specifically, I thought I would post a bit about what I shall be reading this summer, followed by a short list of summer reading recommendations for hypothetical people who are interested in such things.

The books pictured above are my own summer reading, not what I am suggesting for others specifically. Although it's always nice to have people read along with me, I won't suggest things I haven't finished reading yet.

Of course, I forge ahead with the Harvard Classics Library. The current volume turns its attention to early Christian writings. I am currently reading The Confessions of Saint Augustine and next up I have The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis. The next volume of the Harvard Classics looks like this:

VIII. Agamemnon, The Libation-Bearers, The Furies and Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus
Oedipus the King and Antigone of Sophocles
Hippolytus and The Bacchæ of Euripides
The Frogs of Aristophanes

I may skip Oedipus as I read it about a year ago. The non-Harvard Classics title which I plan to read this summer is The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. My father recommended it to me on the phone the other day and, as fortune would have it, it had already been sitting on my "to read" pile for a few months. So, it is my intention to get to it this summer, possibly over our vacation (although it looks like our vacation calendar is rapidly filling with Shakespeare, art museums, and meals with loved ones. I'm not sure how much reading I'll get done on our trip.) Realistically, this will most likely take me up to the time of year when the college students are coming back into town, so that is my summer reading list.

I am given to understand that the concept behind "Summer Reading" is similar to the concept of summer dining. One doesn't take sauerkraut and sausage to a light, white wine and salad beach party and, I would dare to speculate, not a whole lot of people sunbathing down the California coast are going to be laying out on the towel with The Gulag Archipelago. I am not sure the list above is a Summer Reading list so much as the books I happen to be reading in the season of summer this year. So, I thought I might make a short list of suggestions for those who are interested in a suggested Summer Reading list. Here is something light, something dark, something modern, an abyss of a book, and a poetry selection.

The Best of Wodehouse: An Anthology - I think P.G. Wodehouse is the very picture of summer reading: light, smart, compelling, and highly entertaining. He may be most famous for his Jeeves character and I would say rightly so. I recommend Wodehouse to anyone and this is a good starting point.

Murder of Angels - Long time readers of this blog know that I've been beating the Caitlin R. Kiernan drum for many years (probably close to a decade now.) I still think she is one of the best contemporary authors. Murder of Angels is, in my opinion, her best work and a great place to start. I do need to state that her work is exceedingly dark, so please do be prepared for that. But it is a rip-roaring good summer book for those who like books that grab them by the throat. I would also add that Amazon seems to currently have this title on extreme sale, so this would be a good time to get it. Let me say in no uncertain terms, it is a wonderful book.

Nightwood (New Edition) - Nightwood is one of those books that sticks in my mind long after I've read it, turning it over and over like a stone in my hand that I got from a creek-bed. It is a dreamlike, modernist narrative. The language is luscious and heady. I was first turned onto the book by this article by Siri Hustvedt in which she recalls her strange history with the book and interaction with the author. I was especially grabbed by the description of copious underlinings and margin notes and, indeed, I found it to be a book, although only about 200 pages, in which one can swim for months. Highly, highly recommended. One of the grossly underrated modern masterpieces.

House of Leaves - And speaking of modern masterpieces in which one can swim for months, House of Leaves is one of those books which transforms the reader. The narrative within starts to seep into the life of the reader and lines between fiction and reality get a little blurry. I do not exaggerate to say that it is one of the best books of the past 20 years and that everyone should read it. It also happens to be a rollicking good read.

Letters to Guns - Brendan Constantine is a friend of mine, but I include this selection in this list because he is also one of the best contemporary American poets. And I'm just going to cut and paste the Amazon product description for this book:

Letters To Guns represents a collection of poems that examine the para-physical natures of love and history, at times re-imagining both. As the poems progress, eight letters arrive written by non-human addressees (a nightgown, a grove of trees, a wooden spoon, others) at random points over the last 2,200 years. They are messages from home and pleas for understanding, warnings and promises of change. These in turn ignite other poems and themes which anticipate the next arrival. Taken together, the letters form an armature, a living skeleton fleshed by real and metaphenomenal experience. Throughout, a variety of styles appear and no single approach to poetry pervades. Singly, these poems should challenge and entertain. As a group they must transform and evolve our experience of sitting down with a book of poems.

So, that should give some of you a lovely summer's worth of reading. Good Summer to you and happy reading.

Ta!

Podcast Roundup

2011-05-31T10:58:00.000-07:00

I have a long, daily commute, so I work on getting as many regular podcasts as possible. Occasionally I list the latest finds and post them here in case someone out there might like them too.

The Thrilling Adventure Hour- This is quite simply one of the best podcasts available right now. No matter what other podcast uploads, if there is a new TAH, I bump it to the top of my playlist. They are recorded live and they are shows in the style of old timey radio shows. They are hilarious, but they are also incredibly well written. Some of the best are Sparks Nevada, which mashes up westerns and space, and Beyond Belief, which is about a society page couple who have adventures in the paranormal. I cannot recommend this show highly enough. It is hilarious and gloriously clever.

Stuff You Should Know- I am really late to this party. They've been doing this podcast for years and I've only just now discovered it. Which provides me with a trove of 300 some past episodes to listen to! This is a show where two guys explain a subject for laypeople. The topics tend toward the sort of idle questions that impress people if you have an answer ready at hand (some recents: do you stay conscious after decapitation? What is parkour? What is molecular gastronomy? How do people get drawn into cults?) I am regularly surprised by how often the information covered in their podcasts come up in the course of my daily life. Truly no knowledge is useless. It is also a bit on the informal side which aids in digestion and, ideally, inspires more in-depth exploration on the information raised.

And then I learned that there is a whole Stuff You Should Know world of podcasts. One of the better, along with the original, is Stuff To Blow Your Mind. The distinction seems to be more of an exclusively science focused podcast. There is also Stuff You Missed in History which I like, but they tend to be short. I avoid short podcasts on my commute because it requires pushing buttons while driving. 25-60 minutes are what I look for. There is also Stuff Your Mom Never Told You which I have next on my queue and Tech Stuff. There may be others.

Motley Fool Money- This podcast is four guys, one imagines sitting around a table, speaking excitedly about a topic. One sees this format of show with sports or politics. In this case, it is the week's business news and the state of specific stocks. They have a section in the middle in which they interview someone, usually someone with a book coming out. The Achilles Heel of this podcast is a very short shelf life (it comes out Friday and, I would imagine, is dated by 8:05 am Monday morning), so I listen to it as soon as it comes out. I would also add that while they are not purposely difficult in their terminology, they don't tend to slow down to explain concepts so one is called upon to keep in mentally. The effect is a bit like a morning jog. They are transparent enough to tell you up front that people on the show may have a vested interest in some of the stocks mentioned. But really, aside from publicly funded news sources that don't rely on advertisers, that is no different from any other news source save for the honesty.

NPR's Planet Money- Another business news podcast which does take some pains to put the cookies on a lower shelf and, for example, explain the IMF in terms that someone who has only just heard of such a thing can understand. I want to emphasize my conviction that this is something sorely needed in modern journalism. So often I meet, for example, someone who claims to hate the Federal Reserve because their favorite television or radio entertainment show told them to, but then gets spotty when pressed to explain exactly what the Federal Reserve actually does. However, I would hasten to add that this podcast is not simply a sixth-grade economics refresher course. It very much attempts to explain the current global business climate and, albeit very conservatively, to forecast a bit.

Enjoy.

The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe

2011-05-27T13:33:00.003-07:00

Every Bally Poem by Robert Burns

2011-05-27T12:29:00.000-07:00

I have to start by saying I feel like I have made it over one hump in this project. A quick look back at the list of Harvard Classics shows me that while there are still volumes of poetry to come, this is the last in the series that compiles every poem ever written by a single poet. I have two theses on this volume to make right up front: 1) I enjoyed the work of Robert Burns immensely however 2) I strongly feel that poems are not meant to be read in this manner (looking over at my bookshelf, I'm suddenly acutely aware that I will probably never take down Allen Ginsberg's White Shroud or Cosmopolitan Greetings again except to move. Why do I even own these aside from the latter being autographed? Who reads White Shroud and why?), although I'm partly to blame for that. In the interest of moving this project along, I sat down in long stretches and read the book like a novel. I think it is generally wiser and more helpful to read a poem or two each day rather than 45 pages of one page poems in a sitting. It put me in mind of Truman Capote's assessment of Venice which he said was "like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go.”"

The poems of Burns are, or at least were (the much poorer we), deeply ingrained in Western Civilization. Like Shakespeare and Milton, a lot of the phrases we say on a daily basis came from his pen. I share Dr. Eliot's feeling that Burns was one of the greatest poets in the English language. His mastery of composition makes it seem easy and conversational. I was always amazed and delighted to come across a great, classic poem in this volume of course (what with all of the loves being like red red roses, auld acquaintances getting overlooked, and all of those murine and homonid plans going agley) but I found that I was equally interested in the vast eccentricities included therein.

A good share of Burns' work are songs, generally rewriting lyrics to existing songs, none of which I had ever heard of before (so the titles read along the lines of "Nancy's the Cutie o' the Glen- to the tune of 'There's a Wee Clootie in a But an' Ben.'" P.S. Not an actual Burns title. It's a composite. Like New York magazine does.) So it's kind of like reading the lyrics to a new Weird Al album when you're past the age of knowing all popular music. Except to the lyrical content of Burns I would employ the adjective "clever" rather than "novelty."

He also wrote a lot of mean-spirited epitaphs for people he didn't like. It would take an extraordinarily charming human to prevent this from being the very pinnacle of déclassé. Burns is almost that charming.

The most inscrutable pieces, which left me clamoring for an editor, are the pieces which comment on long forgotten "current events." I know enough from my travels in Great Britain and my vast library of Sir Harry Lauder recordings to make sense of Burns' often thick dialectical writing. I know enough of history to hirple along with him when he brings up Wallace or Charles James Fox. But even living in the golden age of the internet was no help when he starts naming a provincial minister who held some unpopular point of doctrine.

My knowledge of Burns' biography lacks coordination, I'm afraid, and the introductory note gives the briefest of flyovers. I do know that he was censured by the Kirk-session for an unwedlocked intimacy with a young lady. I sensed a somewhat jaded view of religion in Burns although I did not sense a falling away from faith, which served to draw me closer to Burns.

I think I like Burns best when he writes benedictions. He was very graceful in these. This passage from a lament for James, the Earl of Glencairn very much put me in mind of my friend Rob who passed away almost a year ago now:

"The bridegroom may forget the bride

Was made his wedding wife yestereen;

The monarch may forget the crown

That on his head an hour has been;

The mother may forget the child

That smiles sae sweetly on her knee;

But I'll remember thee, Glencairn,

And a' that thou hast done for me!"

As we become more distant from one another even as we grow more global as a culture, the poems of Robert Burns are one of those literary treasure troves caches growing dusty from misuse. This is a tragedy we all share. I cannot recommend highly enough that you get a volume of Burns and read from it as often as you can.

Just limit yourself to a half dozen poems or less a day.

Good Wine For The Rest Of Us- A Tutorial

2011-05-26T16:49:00.000-07:00

omni homo primum bonum vinum ponit et cum inebriati fuerint tunc id quod deterius est tu servasti bonum vinum usque adhuc

There are two types of people who write about wine: those who put forth the image of expertise and those who start by saying, "I'm no expert. I'm just someone who loves wine." In an attempt to elucidate my point I shall employ an analogy. When I was in college, there was a girl I tried to date once who was a fan of the music of Tori Amos. I too enjoyed the work of Tori Amos, but the experience taught me something. There are two types of fans of Tori Amos: those who love Tori Amos, and those who love Tori Amos and many other things in life as well. Being a latter at the time, it was immediately evident to both of us that an impassable chasm lay between the two mindsets.

While I do accept the designation of oenophile, I am strictly an amateur. I am never going to be one who gets paid to devote their life to wine. Given my vow of poverty, I'm never going to be one of those people who get to buy a case of Chateau Lafite Rothschild Bordeaux and properly store it in a wine cellar for upwards of 20 years. But this does not mean that I am doomed to a life of bad wine. I do know a few things that may help the perplexed and thought it might be helpful to some hypothetical out there to craft a blog post on the topic. It is the next in my new series of "bon vivre sans crainte" posts.

You may have heard it said that a good, or even great, bottle of wine is not necessarily the most expensive. I will say right up front that this post is not intending to be a full course of the subject of wine, teaching you about all aspects on the subject, transforming you into a fountain of wit and fascination at your next cocktail party. This post is meant to fill a void that I see in wine discussions for the novice, which is simple direction on getting a good bottle of wine into your hands in a market flooded with variety, especially focusing on the audience who may have budget dictated restrictions. This is my contribution to the question "How do I even get started?"

Where to buy:

Ideally you will want to find a wine merchant. Depending where you're located this may be a small wine shop or one of those grand, lush (as it were) places with a bar made from the wood of a tree that Beowulf used to worship and a sommelier in a new and freshly pressed Monterey Jazz Festival t-shirt. If you're in Northern California like me or in other famous wine-making regions, there are vintners at your very backyard waiting to give you tours, tastings, and exits through the gift shop.

Also ideally, a wealthy eccentric has picked your name at random from a phone book, willed their multi-billion dollar estate to you, and died, leaving you to a life of leisure, beauty, philanthropy, and solving mysteries. In other words, the ideals above are the sort of thing that give the appearance of good wine being cost prohibitive. I will touch on the "investment wines" briefly, but we are mainly concerned with the daily glass, maybe the weekend dinner party glass, in this article. Above are the sort of places one can indulge in when one is on vacation or has a sudden windfall. But what about those of us who toil and labor for our happiness?

General rule of thumb: if you could, not saying you would, but if it is possible to go to make your purchase and buy a Snickers bar along with your bottle of wine, you are in the wrong place. A local organic food co-op is a good place to try. The sort places you go to avoid other supermarkets and wish you could just buy everything there (e.g. Trader Joe's, World Market, Whole Foods) are also decent places for our purposes.

A few words on the largest wine distributor in America:

Inevitably in these conversations, someone trying to be helpful will mention America's largest wine distributor. The largest wine distributor in America is Costco. For those of you unfamiliar with Costco, it is to Walmart what basic cable is to regular television. You pay a yearly subscription and can then purchase bulk items at the illusion of bulk item prices. For effect I shall indulge myself in the hyperbolic and state that my experience shopping there is to Dante's Gluttony circle of Hell (complete with three heads guarding the threshold) what Begotten is to the Book of Genesis. Yes, you can find a decent wine at Costco, but first of all, remember the candy purchasing tip. Second, the purpose of this entire endeavor is to improve the quality of our lives. While I cringe at those who apply the axiom broadly to all of life, I do feel that in the case of luxury items, the concept "If it's not fun, don't do it" is applicable. Granted, I suppose for the more adventurous out there a trip to an emergent lugubrious region re-enactment society in order to bring home a prize could be fulfilling in a Greco-Roman heroic sort of way. I cannot personally recommend this course of action.

What To Buy:

First and foremost, ask questions of people who know more than you. You may want to bear in mind that the person you're talking to may have recently had a meeting where their supervisor instructed them to push a certain wine, but that isn't always necessarily a bad thing. Just something to keep in mind. As Socrates said, "As for me, all I know is that I know nothing." Never be shy to learn. Ignorance is an opportunity to be seized. If there is a meaning to existence, I imagine it probably falls close to the whole "we are the process of physics appreciating itself" theory.

There are, however, a few guidelines I would offer.

Eschew the novelty wines. You may get a chuckle when you bring out the bottle of Scraping the Barrel or Cardinal Zin (and I hasten to add that these may be just fine. I wouldn't know and don't plan on finding out), but so often the memorability of those bottles does not extend beyond the label. Another rule of thumb: ask yourself What Would Jeeves Do? (you may even be able to procure a bracelet with that acronym) and then steer toward the more conservative labels.

This is your chance to explore and learn, try new things, and discover for yourself what you like and don't like. I would also steer you away from Pinot Noir as it is not a varietal generally associated with the word "budget."

I look for a red wine with a fairly deep punt (the indentation in the bottom of the bottle) about two finger-knuckles deep:

"Why?" Well, there are a lot of views of the punt out there. I was taught that it has to do with the distribution of the sediments at the bottom of the bottle and/or, more specifically, that the wine-maker cares about such things. If you are purchasing a nicer bottle of red, you will want to store it for several years and, when you do, things like sediment become important.

On the label you want to look for the word "Reserva" or some linguistic variation thereof. Briefly, it is generally the best of the batch.

But the key to buying better wine on a budget is knowing your regions. It's a bit reductionist to say that a particular region generally is known for doing something specific better than others, however "reductionism" is also today's secret word! Here's a quick chart which you can clip and keep in your wallet, culled largely from The Winemaker Cooks: Menus, Parties, and Pairings

Northern California- sparkling and white. Think "like the weather". Zinfandels and Shiraz to be sure but any good wine cellar/rack is going to have Sonoma Coast Chardonnays. It is also, for us deep red fans, the place for Cabernet Sauvignon, the king of wines, and Merlot, the archbishop.

Oregon's Willamette Valley- Pinot Gris

New Zealand- Sauvignon Blanc

France- Cabs, champagne. All those clarets from the Bordeaux region.

Italy- Falanghina, Soave, Aglianico, Sauvignon Blanc, Cabs

Australia- sparkling, Rieslings, Chardonnays, Semillons.

Spain- Andalusian sherry, Tempranillo, Macabeo, Palomino, Pedro Ximenez, Garnacha, Verdejo.

India- Ah, my beloved India! Cabs, Shiraz, Merlot, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, and Zins.

Portugal-Port and Madeira

Chile- Cabernet and Merlot especially. Chardonnay, Syrah, Sauvignon Blanc, Rieslings, Gewurztraminers, Carmenere.

Switzerland- Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, Semillon

Argentina- Malbec, Cabs, Chardonnay, Merlot, and Torrontes.

There are more, but there's a good start. If this is for a dinner party, Chardonnay for chicken and fish, Cabs for beef. Leave pork pairings to the infidels. You're on your own with cheese and dessert. That is far to intricate a topic for our purposes here. Although I would take a moment to say that the dessert wines should be sweeter than the dessert and, therefore, should be poured with restraint.

A quick word on stoppers: In days gone by, a good wine was corked. This is no longer accepted wisdom and you can find really great wine with screwtops and those weird polymer corks. The days of recoiling from non-corked bottles are over.

When To Drink:

This is where a person in the know is indispensable in the purchasing of wine. Some wines are fine to drink as soon as you get in the door. Heck, in the car on the way home if you want! Some wines you want to let age slowly. Ideally you will have a place to store your wine out of direct light, cool, even a bit humid if you can swing it, stored on their side and turned every month or so.

How To Drink:

There's a reason why people keep wine in cellars. You want your reds cool and your whites cold.

Use all of your senses. Look, smell, taste. Um... listen, I guess. Remember that a great deal of your taste mechanism is ties up with your sense of smell. Historically, the practice of giving a sample at the table at a restaurant and the host of the table smelling, then tasting, is vestigial from by-gone days when one was more likely to encounter a bad bottle of wine.

Personally, I highly highly recommend a wine aerator. They are not that expensive and I will testify under oath that they work with red wines (largely useless for white wines.) They will make a great wine better, and a not so great wine better (we run a lot of Two Buck Chuck through ours.) Occasionally you will encounter someone who calls them a gimmick, but it is from the same type of person who would say that an electric mixer is a waste of time because you can whip egg whites by hand. Sure you can. Sure you can.

There is so much more that could be said, but I think I've provided a skeleton. Have fun and explore. Enjoy!

Ta!

Let's All Write a Ballade!

2011-05-14T19:52:00.000-07:00

You: Eine minuten bitte! Haven't we already done this form, Paul?

Me: No, that was a ballad. This is a ballade.

You: Well, you ask a stupid question, you get a stupid answer.

Me: The ballade is a very old French poetic form. The name of the form means "dancing song" which went far to inform my choice in material. More on that in a moment.

This is, in my opinion, along with the sestina, most likely one of the more difficult forms we've tackled thus far. One of the more traditional variations is three rhymed stanzas; final line of the stanzas repeat and the three stanzas are followed by an envoi, which is half the length of the stanzas, addressed to an important figure, and generally summing up the thesis of the matter expressed in the poem. The rhyme scheme is as follows: ababbcbC ababbcbC ababbcbC bcbC. Got it? That's okay. That's why the good Lord gave us examples.

Unfortunately I was unable to come up with an example of a famous ballade being read or sung in English to my satisfaction by means of example for this post. So, I took it upon myself to record one for the occasion, which I probably should have been doing all along. Here is A Ballade of Suicide by G.K. Chesterton, read by me.

And here is the ballade of my own composition. Ron Padgett expresses that ballades are often tailored to a specific occasion. That mixed with the "dancing song" lead me to reflect on this specific time of year. It is the very merry month of May in which, much to the chagrin of my sinuses, everything is blooming. Of course, May also makes me think of May Day, the holiday of the extreme Left, which also put me in mind of how we are in that time of year when there are very few holidays. I love the Spring, but it becomes a bit quotidian in going to work, coming home, going on walks, and so forth. Between Easter and Independence Day, I am hard pressed to think of any major holiday markers in my year. But returning to the theme of Spring and dancing, I pictured togas and outdoor dancing around a fire, a rite of Spring feeling. Then I sat down and composed this:

Bona Dea Ballade
by Paul Mathers

Play Now! Beat ye a tune upon the tabor!
Phoebus reflecting on verdant Spring's moon.
To mark the end of a warm day's labor
a draught, a dance, a merry piper's tune,
we shed our clothes, our wintery cocoon.
Invoke Terpsichore and Bacchus with lyre.
Our joy and hope to plant what will grow soon
and so we honor May with this bonfire.

As Peter's fingerprint on the zeus faber,
the budding green the hillsides now festoon.
Crops we hope the gods will show their favor.
Our time spent out of doors is opportune
to love and work, to pleasure and commune
with Nature's blooming bounty we aspire.
So now to Death we fancy us immune.
And so we honor May with this bonfire.

In unity we grasp the hands of neighbors.
Our path we with all sacred life attune.
Our ploughshares made of former swords and sabers
and drunk with blessed existence we swoon.
'Pon this small blue dot which we all were hewn,
our forefathers who crawled out of the mire,
that Fortune permits us at all's a boon.
And so we honor May with this bonfire.

Maia, who follows Artemis in lune,
May your regard this Beltane we acquire.
May none your sweet benevolence impugn.
And so we honor May with this bonfire.

All I Want Is A Proper Cup of Coffee Made in a Proper Copper Coffee Pot

2011-05-08T16:11:00.000-07:00

The Sultan and Kersia

In spite of my well-documented tea enthusiasm, I am also a devotee of coffee. In fact, I would estimate that I drink more coffee than I drink tea. This is probably partly due to having had the past decade of circumstances dictating remarkably peculiar sleep schedules (while tea contains more caffeine per pound than coffee, a cup of coffee actually contains more caffeine than a cup of tea. We will unpack the reason for this anon. It has to do with what one does with the product.) But undoubtedly it also has to do with my tendency to gravitate toward deep, dark, rich flavors (e.g. dark chocolate, red wine, black tea, opaque beers, heavily spicy foods, and, back in the days before I was stricken with asthma, pipe tobacco.)

Before we get started on brewing methods, a quick word about purchasing a good coffee. There are fabulously grand brands of coffee and, indeed, an entire culture of extraordinarily fancy, ornate, and sublime coffees out there. A fine starting point for the novice is this book: God in a Cup: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Coffee which deals with the world of hyper-excellent coffee-making and the hyper-obsessive people embroiled in the quest for the peak coffee experience. When one ventures into the finer varieties of those beverages, one finds that they contain flavors that one never would have associated with the drink. As our hero Mr. Lagerfeld might say, they go "beyond coffee" to places where one gains a deeper understanding of the drink and, I would even dare falling into pretension to suggest, the universe around them.

It is a deep rabbit hole which one who wishes to engage further in the world can spend a lot of time exploring. However, for our purposes here, we are hardly talking about cupping or techniques of roasting or "God in a Cup." I will leave exploration thereof to the enthusiastic. You can geek out significantly on coffee and I recommend that you do. Here, on the other hand, I mean to focus, via my new gadget, on waking up of an average morning and brewing one's self a very good cup of coffee as a reward for continuing to exist. There is a reason why it is the second most traded commodity on Earth today, second only to crude oil (and, as a renewable resource, less vulnerable in the marketplace to the whims of speculators.)

As for the diurnal cup, find a decent dark roast whole bean coffee (leave the roasting and blending to the professionals unless you become so much of an enthusiast that you branch out in that direction too. It really is a craft in the most Germanic sense of the word.) Eschew the aluminum can. Ideally, grind it yourself and don't buy more than a week's worth at one time. Use about two tablespoons of grounds to six ounces of water. As to what to use to brew it, I've used a French Press for the past six months until my friend Paul sent me a style of coffee-maker, entirely new to me, for my birthday.

Of course, with tea, the idea is to infuse the water with the flavor of the tea leaves by pouring water over them (my mnemonic device of my own devising:
"Tea over water
isn't how you oughta.
Water over tea,
that's how it should be") and seeping the leaves in the water for a few minutes. With coffee, I do not recommend a drip coffee-maker because the concept is similar to tea infusion and you miss several of the elements present in other coffee-makers with the goal of extracting as much flavor from the bally beans as you can. Coffee and tea are comparable to apples and oranges. Also, drip brewing systems are difficult to clean properly and, in my experience, will never last you as long as a French Press. You get a much better cup from wetting the grounds, allowing them to infuse into the water, then pressing every last bit of flavor back out of them. An espresso maker (one of which we also own. It was a wedding gift) is good for this as you compact the grounds very tightly and the high temperature and high pressure of the water sort of do that job for you. However, in my experience, an espresso maker in the home is a bit too involved when you wake up at 3:40 and have to get on the road by 4:00. Besides, it is called an Espresso maker because it was intended to make the form of specific coffee drink known as Espresso, which is galaxies away from what we're talking about here. Like so much of life, one must take into account the age-old wisdom "Just because we can do a thing doesn't necessarily mean that we should."

I have also heard convincing arguments in favor of what is known as a vacuum coffee pot, but every time I look at one I think "You know, I couldn't imagine having one of those in my home before I own a Tesla Coil and a Theremin."

But, let's get to today's experiment with my brand new AeroPress Coffee Maker which the package boasts is the best coffee maker that someone who said that has ever owned:

One places the cylinder on top of one's coffee mug, places a small round filter (provided in abundance with the maker, but also easily fashioned on one's own) at the bottom and fills the cylinder with coffee grounds, then water. Stir the two for a few seconds, then place the plunger in the top of the cylinder.

Simply by firmly pressing the plunger down with firm but slow pressure, you are super-brewing your coffee by harnessing several forces of physics at once. Gravity, infusion, and pressure are all making a very strong cup of coffee for you. Now here's the taste test.

Yes, I have to admit, it is a darned fine cup of coffee. In fact, better than I'd anticipated. The speed with which is makes a good cup of coffee and the ease of cleanup were beyond my expectations.

Aroma Comments: Excellent, heady, whisps of the aroma waft up the nose to tickle the olfactory bulbs of your brain.

Acidity: Good and hearty without giving cause for fear.

Mouthfeel: Superlative. Like a mouthful of rich caramel (See previous post)

Flavour: Dark, rich, heavy, everything I love about coffee. The fantastic aroma slaps a bit of the bitter away.

Aftertaste: Fumigating my oral cavity like holding a puff of cigar smoke.

Balance, overall notes: Extremely balanced. Balanced beyond measure. Balancing itself off kilter.

Final Scoring: I feel I am not overstating by saying that this was one of the better cups of coffee I've ever made.

And now we have a cute little coffee-making nook on our kitchen counter.

The one advantage I would still say the French Press has over the AeroPress is that it makes about a pot's worth of coffee at once. However, I must needs concede that the AeroPress makes a better cup of coffee. Thank you, Paul.

I hope you've enjoyed my brief, remedial coffee tutorial. Now here's a novelty song:

How to make homemade caramel

2011-05-02T21:05:00.000-07:00

Tonight I was sitting on the porch, alternately translating the Latin Vulgate into English and reading the poetry of Robert Burns, when I was struck with a theopneustic moment in light of a difficult few days and, specifically, remedies thereunto. Knowing full well Laurie will be home soon, I thought, "Wouldn't it be nice for her to come home to some homemade caramel for putting on iced cream or popping corn?"

Caramel is ridiculously easy to make and, once you know how quick, economical, and easy the process, you will most likely wonder why you don't do it all the time. Soon you too will ridicule how easy it is to make.

First you need 1 cup of sugar, 6 Tablespoons of butter, and a half cup of Half and Half (or any other milk derivative you have laying around your fridge. I just happen to always have Half and Half on hand for tea. I would recommend the thicker milk products, closer to the cream end of the spectrum. I am in no position to recommend Fat Free or Soy Milk.) Keep all of these right next to you because the process is exceedingly quick. You will be called upon to move quickly in the preparation of your caramel or the whole thing will go to pot, as it were. It is a testimony to my deft camera finger that I was able to photograph the experience for this post at all. If you put Tom Waits' Glitter and Doom album on when you start (like I did) you will be done before Get Behind The Mule is over.

Place the sugar in a saucepan. You want a higher heat. When the edges of the sugar in the pan begin to brown and pull away from the edge of the pan, you start whisking. This is a crucial moment and you must be diligent in your whisking. Burning is a very real peril in this process. Be ever vigilant in your whisking, my little catechumen confectioners!

If you can, you probably want a larger whisk as the pan is very hot. You will whisk the sugar until...

...it is roughly the consistency of caramel. Let me restate, what is shown in this picture is just sugar at this point.

Then you add the butter and whisk until it melts. Oh yes, get used to whisking. Your universe is a whisking universe for the next few minutes. Note the discarded novelty whisk which I started with until I darned near singed all of my arm hair off.

Is it all melted now? Are you responding by saying "yes?" Then it's time to take it off of the heat and place the pan on one of the neighboring cooler burners.

You will keep whisking and slowly pour the Half and Half into the mixture. This rushed picture with my thumb halfway over the flash fails to capture what a dramatic juncture this is in our narrative. It bubbles and steams and tries to wrap its fingers around your throat to drag you down to Hell as the three ingredients die by your hand and a new foodstuff is born like the phoenix. Do not heed that devil-caramel! Whisk it into submission!

Soon it will get over itself and look like caramel. You will initially think you put in too much Half and Half, but never fear! It will thicken upon settling.

And now you have homemade caramel which tastes as good as store-bought because it is the same thing.

Rhinoviral Review! A guide for the perplexed

2011-04-28T18:18:00.000-07:00

Things I do when I have a head cold that truly seem to help:

1. The Neti-pot (pictured above.) Sinus irrigation that seems to stave off my natural propensity to transform a rhinoviral infection into a secondary infection, be it in the sinus cavity or the bronchial tubes. I cannot recommend this invention highly enough.
2. Cold-Eeze lozenges or their generic counterparts. I swear by them that, taken every second waking hour during a head cold, they genuinely shorten the length and intensity of the cold. I also employ menthol lozenges, however I assume their effect are purely palliative.
3. Analgesics and lots of them overlapping as often as I can. Inflammation is your enemy, so pump yourself full of anti-inflammatories I say.
4. Steam. Breathed in liberally especially upon waking.
5. Lots of sleep. My mother taught me that if I'm too sick to go to school, I'm too sick to play. I still have that ethic. Today, for example, I slept about 16 hours.
6. Lots of fluids, especially those gleaned from citrus fruit.

Things I do when I have a head cold which may or may not work. I genuinely don't know but do them anyway:

1. Chamomile tea with a spoonful of molasses.
2. Apple cider vinegar.
3. A half a glass of red wine taken in the hour of sleep.
4. Feeding a cold. These two seem more like an excuse although I am told that the body needs extra nutrients when fighting a virus. Laurie notes the gusto with which I apply this proverb.
5. Nasal spray. Used very sparingly and even less so since I've discovered the Neti-pot. But I was told by my physician many years ago that leaving a sinus cavity congested is a bit like having a rain forest. An eco-system will evolve there. I have also heard convincing arguments that nasal sprays can do more harm than good in the "come down."

Things I do when I have a head cold which probably don't help, but I do anyway: '

1. Deny that I have a head cold.

P.S. I am returning to work tomorrow. Thank you to all of the well wishers and I wish you all a healthy Spring.

Fernando Pessoa on my brain

2011-04-25T10:37:00.000-07:00

I usually attempt to eschew quotations in my writings aside from the occasional epigram or quotational exclamation point to something I've just said (occasionally sneaking an "appeal to authority" logical fallacy in to see if anyone notices.) I'll spare you my finger wagging reasons why. Suffice it to say, I feel better in my writing when quotation is a tool used infrequently.

Having said that, I just came across this passage by the incomparable Fernando Pessoa from The Book of Disquiet (Penguin Classics)
which, through its high accuracy, struck me to the quick. Pessoa, along with being one of the greatest writers in history, is clearly a time traveler and a mind reader. The quote below is a fine illustration of about 1/3rd of the existential dilemma I've been writing about of late. I think about this all the time and, perhaps if you do too, you may at the very least find a modicum of consolation in the articulation of the existential dread. You may even feel slightly less lonely.

Lacking the time to formulate an original post for the next day or two, I thought I would post it here to share it, but also to have a place of easy reference for myself (by the way, I hadn't announced it on this blog yet, but I am now officially writing another play. More on that soon.) Here's Pessoa:

“If I carefully consider the life men lead, I find nothing to distinguish it from the life of animals. Both man and animal are hurled unconsciously through things and the world; both have their leisure moments; both complete the same organic cycle day after day; both think nothing beyond what they think, nor live beyond what they live. A cat wallows in the sun and goes to sleep. Man wallows in life, with all of its complexities, and goes to sleep. Neither one escapes the fatal flaw law of being what he is. Neither one tries to shake off the weight of being. The greatest among men love glory, but not the glory of a personal immortality, just an abstract immortality, in which they don’t necessarily participate.

"These considerations, which occur to me frequently, prompt an admiration in me for a kind of person that by nature I abhor. I mean the mystics and ascetics—the recluses of all Tibets, the Simeon Stylites of all columns. These men, albeit by absurd means, do indeed try to escape the animal law. These men, although they act madly, do indeed reject the law of life by which others wallow in the sun and wait for death without thinking about it. They really seek, even if on top of a column; they yearn, even if in an unlit cell; they long for what they don’t know, even if in the suffering and martyrdom they’re condemned to.

"The rest of us, living animal lives of varying complexity, cross the stage as walk-ons who don’t speak, satisfied by the pompous solemnity of the crossing. Dogs and men, cats and heroes, fleas and geniuses—we all play at existing without thinking about it (the most advanced of us thinking only about thinking) under the vast stillness of the stars. The others—the mystics of pain and sacrifice—at least feel, in their body and their daily lives, the magic presence of mystery. They have escaped, for they reject the visible sun; they know plenitude, for they’ve emptied themselves of the world’s nothingness.

"Speaking about them, I almost feel like a mystic myself, though I know I could never be more than these words written whenever the whim hits me. I will always belong to the Rua dos Douradores, like all of humanity. I will always be, in verse or prose, an office employee. I will always be, with or without mysticism, local and submissive, a servant of my feelings and of the moments when they occur. I will always be, under the large blue canopy of the silent sky, a pageboy in an unintelligible rite, dressed in life for the occasion, executing steps, gestures, stances and expressions without knowing why, until the feats—or my role in it—ends and I can treat myself to tidbits in the large tents I’ve been told are down below, at the back of the garden.”

My 34th Birthday

2011-04-21T10:51:00.000-07:00

It was a perfect storm of allergens. Zephyrus was feeling sprightly and it sprinkled just enough to invigorate the tree pollen, not enough to wash any of it away. As a result I had a low grade sinus headache for my birthday until wine o'clock.

However, first thing upon rising I was greeted by a cheerful knock from the postman who had brought me my recent book order.

The two books are Biblia Sacra Vulgata (Vulgate): Holy Bible in Latin (Latin Edition) and Winnie Ille Pu (Latin Edition). Laurie had a day full of work and meeting, so the rest of my day resembled a more cheerful end of the 'Time Enough At Last' episode of The Twilight Zone had it taken place after the advent of shatterproof lenses.

I've had seafood on my mind for a few weeks and Laurie and I went out for same.

With malice towards none, I will point out Laurie's food in her photo and my folded, patient hands in mine. Something went terribly wrong with my order twice and I was finally given a complementary meal. Terribly wrong. Like I ordered a steak and the first time they brought me a telephone on fire and the second time they brought me cotton gauze drizzled with WD-40. I felt bad for the server who was afraid we would be mad. I wanted to explain to her that we were the best possible customers this could happen to for her, that it's just luxury food and they had done me no malicious evil, and that the restaurant had, in fact, given occasion for something memorable on my birthday. I finally had a nice plate of salmon and shrimp.

And that was my 34th birthday.

Crimes Against Humanities

2011-04-16T22:20:00.000-07:00

"By means of beauty all beautiful things become beautiful." - Socrates

In my mid-20s, I had a nervous breakdown. It came as I was suffering the birth-pangs from the womb of higher education into adulthood, but also as my entire plan for that adult life, which I had been working toward for years, were shattered when the woman I planned to marry dumped me to join a Buddhist meditation community and immediately start seeing someone else. I went a little cra-cra after that.

At the time I was seeing a psychiatrist-in-training from a local university. There are clinics that exist in some universities where one can receive analysis, therapy, treatment, the whole she-bang, for a supremely diminished fee. Personally I feel that, unlike a barber's college, the less experienced may be an asset in this case as the psychiatrist is closer to their education and, more importantly, possibly more current in their understanding of the understanding of workings of the human mind.

The experience helped me through that difficult time and, I think, equipped me for the transition into adulthood in a lot of ways. It was very helpful and I still highly recommend "#1 on the Stanislavski chart" to everyone. But a lot of the harder, more existential wrestling matches in my life have been resolved or, at least, ameliorated in some less conventional outlets. As many of you know, religion has been more of a battlefield than a refuge for me. So much of my therapy has come from other places.

I was listening to All Things Considered the other day when, to my great surprise, a story came on which struck me rather across the face as being intensely classist. The story was about the disturbing trend in America of defunding public libraries (as though those were a huge economic drain in the first place. But I'm already getting ahead of myself.) The story, however, did not focus on that trend being disturbing. Instead the story focused on eBooks, specifically the scramble to optimize profits in that industry and the burden that free lending libraries place on that goal. One solution seems to be the trend toward limiting the amounts of times one can "check out" the virtual intellectual property before the customer (in this case the library) is forced to re-purchase the book.

But hiding in the periphery of the story was the point that has been like a stone in my shoe for the past week. The person interviewed and the interviewer both suggested that brick and mortar libraries with brick and mortar books are becoming archaic in the digital age. I felt they even went so far as to suggest that this was common knowledge and a point not open for debate. I've stated my position on eBooks before. First of all, I don't have an eBook reader because I never have a disposable income of $100+ to spend on one and most of the books I stuff into my brain through my eyes come into my hands gratis, either by parties who support my decidedly bohemian path, or by the very public libraries that, paradoxically, the public radio program was denigrating. I am not against eBooks. In fact, I'm very excited by the world of possibilities they afford, perhaps undermining the Boy's Club publishing industry just as the internet undermined the Boy's Club music industry about a decade ago, and opening the doors for authors who may not have otherwise "made it." I also think the readers, specifically the Kindle and the Nook, are aesthetically pleasing. They look like things I would enjoy carrying around. They also get internet access anywhere, for those times when you're walking down the street thinking "What was the name of that Weimar era cabaret performance artist who staged psycho-sexual nightmares and was fired for breaking a champagne bottle over the head of a patron?"

I live in a poor neighborhood and we have ongoing issues with people who have chosen "substance abuser" as the key selling point on their curriculum vitae. We live directly in the path between the soup kitchen and the shelter, which occasions all manner of behavior outside of the realm of accepted legal social behavior taking place in and around our front yard. It also occasions the people who, for any number of reasons, have been thrown out of said soup kitchen or shelter to camp in or around my front yard. There is a specific older gentleman I'm thinking of who lives in a 1970s one-person sleeper RV filled with detritus which spills out when the door is open, making him into an unwitting Hansel, who camps, lets his dog run free, sells and indulges in what I assume to be methamphetamines, and whose key personality hook, in my experience, seems to be belligerence. The function of the lending library will not be obsolete until that man has unlimited and free access to an eBook reader. I am not saying that their existence will effect this outcome, but their existence ensures that at any time he can go into that building and learn just about anything.

I have another facet of the argument to illustrate, exiting the tenuous realm of the hypothetical and entering the privileged position of personal testimony. In a lot of ways, I was a version of the man in that story once. I was once a drunkard, and I spent a lot of time in front of the television, filling my brain with mediocre crap. At one point, I had a major health scare that gave occasion for me to reevaluate what I was doing with my life. The library is where I then went and largely where I have stayed. I remember one startling realization I had, which is a microcosm of what I am talking about. Laying on my bed, staring at the cottage cheese ceiling after brushing with mortality, the scales fell away from my eyes, and I awakened to the knowledge that I'd never at that point heard one of Beethoven's symphonies all the way through, but that I had probably watched days worth of Gilligan's Island. And I didn't even like Gilligan's Island.

I have a virtual friend, Maura Lafferty, who recently said, "There isn't much in life that can't be solved by Beethoven's 7th." There is a great truth to that statement.

In college, I largely studied the works of, and how to produce productions of, the works of William Shakespeare. I took a Shakespeare Intensive course through Shakespeare & Company. We chose a passage from Shakespeare to work on. The first few days we worked on establishing the emotional connection to the piece. The latter few we worked on text work (scoring the trochees, spondees, and dactyls, and that sort of thing.) I chose a short passage from the beginning of The Winter's Tale when Leontes is waxing soliloquific about his nascent suspicion of his wife's infidelity. I was walked through a series of questions which left me a wailing mass of tears on the floor, what is referred to in psychological circles as "a breakthrough." I was wailing uncontrollably on the floor like a child having an enraged tantrum being ignored and feeling entirely powerless in a savage, predatory world. I was unable to stop it and I remember several people coming and holding me down at one point. Much later I was able to articulate that it was as if I had previously thought I had a well within me, but I then discovered that I had a dormant volcano that extended down to the Earth's molten core.

Later, I had a friend who directed me in a directing-class project of the "wooing of Lady Anne" scene from Richard III. I played Richard and I obsessively threw myself into the part and the study of the work. I remember having a moment, and it still haunts me a little, where I became hyper-aware that I, Paul Mathers, could, under the right circumstances, given certain external stimuli, be Richard III. I could kill. So could anyone else. We all have within us the potential for the greatest good and the starkest evil, or anything in-between. This realization walks around with me. Sometimes it is supremely encouraging. Sometimes it is terrifying.

So often I have worked through a problem with the aid of the humanities. When Rob died last year, as I've so often mentioned, I found no comfort in the places one is commonly sent for comfort in times of grief by well meaning parties. Much to my surprise, I found so much comfort in what I happened to be reading at the time, which was Plato's accounts of the death of Socrates. I have had occasion to recommend the same in the past year to a few people who have been struggling in similar ways in their own lives.

There have been many who have articulated the argument for the humanities far better than I. It is an age old and, I dare say, aphoristic problem that arts and education tend to take the first and harshest cuts whenever budgets are tightened in a society. There are even highly insulting terms often employed like "entitlements" or "unmonetizable knowledge" that inevitably rear their ugly heads. At the risk of being crass, one can imagine the social puppeteers or lunatics who, as the adage would have it, have appropriated the office of the Psychiatric hospital's chief doctor, fully realizing the profit loss of touching the war machine, protecting, creating, and imperializing their financial interests and certainly not touching their own pay rate. Defunding Crackhead Jim's access to beauty and truth seems a much easier pill to swallow. It is a reptilian mindset that suggests parents who give their child a dollar instead of a hug every time the child cries out for love.

Although I will tarry a moment longer in the domain of polemic to point out the key flaw in the "unmonetizable" argument. It can be illustrated by this formula:

The level of focus on The Profit Margin is in direct proportion to the output of crap.

You want a better profit margin, you use cheaper ingredients, you fire the experienced workers and hire cheaper, less experienced employees, you cut corners, you save time. This is why a 30 year old vacuum cleaner is better than a new one. This is the slippery slope of attention to wealth.

Example: 1995- "Let's reclaim the invention of the television for education! Let's make a television station called The Wonder Channel, funded both by subscription AND advertisers, and create content based on learning, exploring, wonder, creativity, truth, and beauty!"
2011- "Next up on '-Der': Barbecue Pit Bosses. Join Cleavus and Lil' Vinton as they build backyard barbecue pits. You will learn neither how to make a barbecue pit nor how to barbecue from watching this program. Mainly you will watch the two leads yell bleeped out swears at each other. Brought to you by Tadalafil."

Eventually the series is canceled when a video from the cutting room floor is leaked to YouTube in which Cleavus gives a profanity-laden rant against one of the credit card companies that finance the show. The entire story is sad and makes the world seem slightly lonelier and life seem slightly more fleeting in the collective unconscious until the only flaccid pleasure people can derive from interacting with the world at large is mock and scoff, guffawing at the very Hellbound handbasket in which they are firmly tucked.

Although a Theater major, I am able to readily identify the unsustainabilty of a system where the bulk of the wealth is funneling to an increasingly smaller percentage of the population and that increasingly smaller percentage is paying increasingly less into the system. The three card monte game of the Right is to fool the working class, through appeals to down-hominess, old fashioned values and so forth, into thinking that they, the Proles, can one day, through hard work and enterprising, become one of them, the Cake-Eaters. This is false.

So, the news is full of talk about defunding the arts and education. As I said before, it's an easy place to cut when you're holding the cutting device and when you interests lay elsewhere. It's way easier to fund and maintain a prison-industrial complex than a flourishing public education system. And, if you don't do the latter, you're going to have to do the former, so I guess they go for what's cheaper and easier. But once again I think of society as something we will to make. The world is what we make of it. What if we had a population who were consumed with truth, beauty, love, equality, and unity? Let's not even go that far though. What if we just had a society where humankind's expressions of and arguments for those highest of virtues were accessible to every citizen? How much better would that be?

And I'm not necessarily making the argument for government funding of the humanities exclusively. As with any other source of funding, there is always the problem of "biting the hand that feeds" the arts, much like poor Cleavus. I am in favor of heavy government funding of the sciences and the humanities. But more to the point, I am for accessibility to the sciences and humanities for everyone. There are many admirable attempts at putting the cookies on lower shelves within the humanities. There are "rush" seatings at most live concert and theater venues in which one can go to the ticket booth within the last 30 minutes before a performance and get severely discounted seats. Many theaters have "pay what thou wilt" nights. The internet has an embarrassment of riches of free resources of lectures, classes, and readings, free for the taking. The doors to the libraries are still open.

I think that the humanities have so much to offer a society. If we must talk about the monetizable aspects (and, unfortunately, there exists the type of philistine tromping around the offices of elected officials who will demand the monetizable aspects) I would bring up health care. Foresight dictates that the future of health care demands preventative health measures. However, the prevailing philosophy of modern western medicine trends exclusively toward the palliative. George Bernard Shaw wrote a brilliant foreword to his play The Doctor's Dilemma in which he makes the point that the paradox of the medical field is that if it ever reached a point of ultimate efficacy, it would put itself out of business.

The Humanities are good for the future health of a society. They allow so many avenues for growth, education, and progress. A civilization filled with growing, educated, and progressing individuals has a more optimistic future than one filled with demotivated, ignorant, cynics. So, investing in the Humanities as a society is much like putting aside money into a long term IRA or Keogh plan.

The Humanities offer so much in the way of mental and physical health to the individual as well. They are a conduit for the highest aspirations of humankind. The Humanities are indicative of a good life, which is something that no one should be denied access to. I would hasten to add that anyone who has studied the great civilizations of old knows that so often the great civilizations fall at the hands of utter brutes. As Dystopian authors or social commentators know, there is a great danger in hiding the light under bushels of reaching the point where "We have seen the brutes who will fell our civilization, and they are us."

The Value of Nothing

2011-04-08T19:24:00.000-07:00

When I was in my early 20s, I had a dream one night which was one of the most important experiences in my subconscious life to date. You see, when I was a child, I had a very rich fantasy life which was fueled by gross dissatisfaction with or outright fear of my peers. My fantasies would mainly revolve around being rescued from this life by Professor X or Gandalf or by suddenly falling heir to Scrooge McDuck's fortune and being whisked away to an exciting and adventurous place where being smart and different is an asset rather than a liability. In my adolescent life, this tendency mutated into a sort of ham-fisted rebellious streak until finally settling, in my early 20s, into the borderline agoraphobic intellectual that you all know and love today.

The dream was about an anthropomorphic manifestation of a universal construct called The Timekeeper of Always. I somehow made the acquaintance of that being and he showed me what goes on behind reality. Reality pulled away like a curtain and I was able to observe what goes on behind everything, the reality in which this one is but a poor reflection of a reflection. Then he thought better of it, replaced the curtain, wiped the memory of what was behind the curtain from my mind, and returned me to the world of consciousness. I woke up unable to remember anything of what was behind the curtain, but able to remember the rest of the dream. It was terrible. Rational Paul knows that this was a manifestation of those same latent desires from childhood, likely poured through the filter of a time in my life when I exclusively read Philip K. Dick, Robert Anton Wilson, Clive Barker, and Neil Gaiman. Still, I am able to tap into that sense of cosmic loss that I felt on waking and here, 12 year later, I am still able to remember the dream (the parts that were not wiped from my memory in the dream) with utter clarity.

Something else I can tap into at any given time is the constant Existential Hum. It is as if I have, in the "soundtrack" of my mind, a tone of Todesangst which toggles volume at divers and sundry points, but which is ever present. Sometimes it's pounding like a bass drum, sometimes it's so high pitched that only dogs can hear it. I would like to be able to say, "Come what may, it is well with my soul. The timing is all. I have no fear of death." But that would be dishonest. I don't have that kind of peace. Death sounds awful to me. It also looks awful to me.

When I become aware of the brevity of this life, I panic. When I think of the likelihood of death as a simple extinguishing of consciousness, I am terrified. When I think that this is happening constantly everywhere on the planet and that, in fact, walking consciousnesses effect that outcome on other walking consciounesses, I am horrified. When I then consider the vastness of the human mind against the great insignificance of the entire Earth, a speck in vast space, I am crippled.

I've noticed a trend in certain types of churches, generally the more accepting and inclusive ones, of becoming a sort of psychic Intensive Care Unit. Unfortunately, wolves and foxes are attracted to places where the smell of blood is strongest. I have often remarked that I feel like an alien in my own religion and in the past year that seems to be transforming me into a Deconstructed Christian. As much as I like to think of myself as one of God's little snowflakes, special and peculiar in my precious little experiences, I think I can see that this turn of events has emerged from specific external stimuli. I know that I'm not the only modern (or, indeed, historical) person going through a similar long, dark night. I know that this is a trend emerging in those whose doberman grip on their religion is keeping them attached to the edge of the cliff just as a florist district emerges in a major metropolitan area without any city planning.

In spite of the truth in Marx's assessment, I do not think that the primary function of a properly applied religious path is as an opiate. However, I reject automatic deference to orthodoxy. I have no interest in impressing my peers or dead white guys with my alignment with them on the issues. I have no interest in impressing others with my religion. My religion is simply my relationship with God and what that means to my behavior in this world. I want to fellowship with other believers and have a free exchange of ideas. I want to love my fellow human and honor my God in my behavior. I do not care if a guy with a book published or sermons broadcast on the radio agrees with me on a point of doctrine that I've come to believe. Having deconstructed my spiritual walk in the past year I find that I cannot reject the Gospel. The most junior of analysts will probably make short work of reconciling this paragraph with the first two.

Let's take the afterlife, for example. Popular Christian versions of the afterlife tend a little too close for my comfort to what I call "action figure religion." As in there are places behind the curtain of reality called Heaven and Hell where people go and there are different places and beings. Golden roads and pearly gates in front of which St. Peter stands behind a podium with a large book and so forth. You could make a diorama of these places. That sort of thing.

The Annihilationist view strikes me as more in line with an Old Testament understanding of the afterlife as well as being more in line with observable reality as I have experienced it. The ignominy suffered by Sodom and Gomorrah lay in their destruction, their snuffing out of existence. The hope and comfort of the Gospel is in the escape from the condition of life, being under the thumb of death, with the possibility of reconciliation with God and eternal life with same. We are unable to restore what was broken. We are all freeloaders at the Divine Feast and it required an act on the part of the divine to even let us in the room, much less give us access to free refills.

I do think that one must needs retain an agnosticism over the afterlife as we do not have a complete set of stats. The ancient Hebrews as well as the ancient Greeks were eyes deep in metaphor. When I say "O, my love is like a red, red rose, that is newly sprung in June" I am not meaning to suggest that Laurie is of a burgundy complexion and that her face literally looks like a collection of petals. It is entirely acceptable in language to employ devises to express a deeper meaning or a meaning not so easily expressed by the conventional employment of vocabulary. Poetry exists to express those things which can only be expressed through poetry.

I have mentioned before that I don't buy the version of the Genesis creation account put forth by so many Christians that it is meant to be read as though it were a history textbook and that anyone who says otherwise is speaking heresy (and, therefore, going to Hell.) The evidence seems to point fairly conclusively to the fact that the planet is upwards of 4 billion years old, which suggests to me that metaphor was being worked with in the writings of a member of an ancient civilization, one who was obviously and like all of us fettered by their space-time understanding of the universe, meant to identify God as creator and thereby set the stage for illustrating humankind's relationship to that deity. Clinging tenaciously to the seven days in spite of all evidence to the contrary not only undermines the credibility of our religion to the eyes of the world, but more importantly, it misses the point. Likewise, as I've said before, I don't think we know or can know exactly how the end of human existence will play out either from the data science has to offer or from eschatological scriptural passages. Once again, I don't think the point of those passages was for us to make charts. I think they were meant to point toward what a Christian ought to focus on and how they ought to behave.

The trend toward churches being ICU wards for the psyche is, I think, entirely appropriate. Existence is extremely harsh and difficult to deal with. Humans treat one another in abysmal ways. God, in my experience and in the experience of so many others I've talked with, so often appears silent to us. This agnosticism of the faithful, the fact that there is so much we do not and cannot know, is the major theme of the book of Job. I would point out that Job is most likely the oldest book of the Bible. So, when it came time for humankind to have divine revelation, that was the first message delivered.

The other night I was completely shaken by a line from a film Laurie and I were watching. It was the film adaptation of the graphic novel The Watchmen and, at one point, the Rorschach character says to his prison psychiatrist in reference to his vigilante dealing with a child murderer "You see, Doctor, God didn't kill that little girl. Fate didn't butcher her and destiny didn't feed her to those dogs. If God saw what any of us did that night he didn't seem to mind. From then on I knew... God doesn't make the world this way. We do."

So often I wonder why God seems to be okay with so many things that go on. I also think so often about how this world can be whatever we make of it... and this is what we've chosen to make of it. What does that say about humankind? And, you see, this is part of why the need for Christ seems entirely plausible to me. However, I don't think the belief leaving me waiting for the Deus Ex Machina to swoop down at the end of the play and save "the good guys" is the appropriate reaction to that information. I don't think religion is the key to isolating one's self from people one dislikes, disagrees with, or simply fears out of extrinsic differences. I find myself more in step with the axiom of the entirely pagan Marcus Aurelius who wrote:

“Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.”

I walk around every day with the absurdity of existence strapped to my forehead, forever in my field of vision. I understand the traditionally Freudian analysis of my alienation and sense of loss over the forgotten dreamtime glimpse behind the curtain. I also know that I my brain might prefer hysterical misery to common unhappiness. I say all of these things, but also still hold to the Gospel. I still am a Christian and, I think, probably more earnest of one than I've ever been. Certainly more than when I had all of the answers neatly arranged on a silver platter. I think congregations would do well to be less surprised to find the dead and the wounded in the pews next to them and remember that they serve the Great Physician.

P.S. It seems that these "talking cure" posts about religion are turning into a regular addition to my blog. Apologies to the hypothetical people who come to my blog for writing about literature. I am finding this practice therapeutic. I also hope that my healing path may occasion some comfort to other hypothetical people out there.