You're probably in the mood to read some poetry, by various poets with very distinctive voices.

You'd probably like to read a spellbinding essay by Paul Cella explaining the incredibly complex financial securities game that almost ruined our nation. Real smart people invented the game. Problem was, they liked playing more than they loved their country.

You've probably been waiting for someone to properly appreciate Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead. Well, Lydia McGrew's done that for you.

How about a short story by Jeff Trippe, a modern romance about a guy, a girl, and a...well, you'll have to read it.

Or an explication of Hemingway's "The Killers."

Or would you like to look at some oil paintings by one of America's best landscape artists?

Of course you would. It can all be found in the current issue of The Christendom Review. Tell everyone you know.

Our thanks to Todd McKimmey.

This book is an attempt to develop a set of instructions, an analysis of what has gone wrong in recent years with the various arts - especially fiction, since that is the art on which I'm best informed - and what has gone wrong with criticism. The language of critics, and of artists of the kind who pay attention to critics, has become exceedingly odd: not talk about feelings or intellectual affirmations - not talk about moving and surprising twists of plot or wonderful characters and ideas -but sentences full of large words like hermaneutic, heuristic, structuralism, formalism, or opaque language, and full of fine distinctions - for instance those between modernist and post-modernist - that would make even an intelligent cow suspicious. Though more difficult than ever before to read, criticism has become trivial.

The trivial has its place, its entertainment value. I can think of no good reason that some people should not specialize in the behavior of the left-side hairs on an elephant's trunk. Even at its best, its most deadly serious, criticism, like art, is partly a game, as all good critics know. My objection is not to the game but the fact that contemporary critics have for the most part lost track of the point of their game, just as artists, by and large, have lost track of theirs. Fiddling with the hairs on an elephant's nose is indecent when the elephant happens to be standing on the baby.

At least in America art is not thought capable, these days, of tromping on babies. Yet it does so all the time, and what is worse, it does so with a bland smile. I've watched writers, composers, and painters knocking off their "works" with their left hands. Nice people, most of them. Artists are generally pleasant people, childlike both in love and hate, intending no harm when they turn out bad paintings, compositions, or books. Indeed, their ambition guarantees that they will do the best they know how to do or think they ought to do. The error is less in their objects than in their objectives. "Art is play, or partly play," they'll tell you with an engaging smile, serving up their non-nutritious fare with the murderous indifference of a fat girl serving up hamburgers. What they say is true enough, as far as it goes, and nothing is more tiresome than the man who keeps hollering, "Hey, let's be serious!" but that is what we must holler.

In a world where nearly everything that passes for art is tinny and commercial and often, in addition, hollow and academic, I argue - by reason and by banging the table - for an old-fashioned view of what art is and does and what the fundamental business of critics ought therefore to be. Not that I want joy taken out of the arts; but even frothy entertainment is not harmed by a touch of moral responsibility, at least an evasion of too fashionable simplifications. My basic message throughout this book is as old as the hills, drawn from Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Dante, and the rest, and standard in Western civilization down through the eighteenth century; one would think all critics and artists should he thoroughly familiar with it, and perhaps many are. But my experience is that in university lecture halls, or in kitchens at midnight, after parties, the traditional view of art strikes most people as strange news.

The traditional view is that true art is moral: it seeks to improve life, not debase it. It seeks to hold off, at least for a while, the twilight of the gods and us. I do not deny that art, like criticism, may legitimately celebrate the trifling. It may joke, or mock, or while away the time. But trivial art has no meaning or value except in the shadow of more serious art, the kind of art that beats back the monsters and, if you will, makes the world safe for triviality. That art which tends toward destruction, the art of nihilists, cynics, and merdistes, is not properly art at all. Art is essentially serious and beneficial, a game played against chaos and death, against entropy. It is a tragic game, for those who have the wit to take it seriously, because our side must lose; a comic game - or so a troll might say - because only a clown with sawdust brains would take our side and eagerly join in.

Like legitimate art, legitimate criticism is a tragicomic holding action against entropy. Life is all conjunctions, one damn thing after another, cows and wars and chewing gum and mountains; art - the best, most important art - is all subordination: guilt because of sin because of pain. (All the arts treat subordination; literature is merely the most explicit about what leads to what.) Art builds temporary walls against life's leveling force, the ruin of what is splendidly unnatural in us, consciousness, the state in which not all atoms are equal. In corpses, entropy has won; the brain and the toenails have equal say. Art asserts and reasserts those values which hold off dissolution, struggling to keep the mind intact and preserve the city, the mind's safe preserve. Art rediscovers, generation by generation, what is necessary to humanness.

---------------------------------------------
Readers are welcome to tell me whose words these are. Without research.

...and still can't see.

I saw the final episode, and it's just as I suspected all along: everybody was dead. I'm not sure when they died exactly; in the plane crash I suppose. Which means that everything that happened post-crash was a sort of purgatorial phantasm. Which further means that viewers and characters both have been seeing dead people. I can only hope that the transition between this life and the next one won't really be drawn out to six seasons worth of TV shows with summers between. In the end, they were all gathered in a church somewhere (except for Ben - don't know what his fate is) and when Jack's father opened the church doors a great white light poured in. None of them fell to their knees, though, so I guess the actual sight of heaven is not the smack-down moment I thought it would be. I got Lost somewhere between seasons 3 and 4, and I think the writers did too and started making stuff up while they decided what their series was really all about. I dare anyone to explain - rationally - all the twists and turns in the storyline so that they add up to the final result. Emphasis on the word 'rationally.' In capital letters.

This guy tries, but I'm not buying. His most telling line: After years of insane complication of plot and character, no ending could have “explained” the show in a wholly satisfying way, and it might have been better not to try. So he then writes a two page column trying. My advice: do not go into the light.

I do think, however, that Evangeline Lilly is something of an angel and ought to be resurrected so that she can appear in as many TV shows, movies, and commercials as possible. She doesn't even have to do anything. Just look at the camera.

Labels: Lost, television

There's a snake in my garage. Writhed his way under a box before I could get hold of him. Excuse me while I do a little search on the internet to find out whether or not he poses a mortal threat.

[Update]: It appears the little fellow was probably one of these:



A ring-necked snake, that is, Diadophis punctatus punctatus, and nonvenomous. That means I can pick him up and pet him (when I find him) rather than take his head off with a machete. Oh, you think I don't have a machete. Well here it is, right next to the axe:



Sharp as a razor, too. It'll take down palmettos, weeds and small trees. I got the axe last summer and went around the yard slamming it into wooden things just to hear the sound of it. The backside can be used as a sledgehammer. Around the same time I got a saw that I really like.




It will cut anything. If you wanted to be one of those serial killers who dismembers the body afterwards, this is the saw for you. Virtually zero spatter. It, along with a chainsaw, resulted in the sleek look of the camphor tree.






When I told my wife there was a snake in the garage, she freaked out. I tried to calm her down by informing her that the ring-necked snake is quite harmless and beneficial. It eats things you don't want around. I told her if she saw it to just pick it up and throw it in the bushes. It's not inclined to bite when handled. She just looked at me like I'd had too much to drink. Hard facts seldom overcome a fear of reptiles. I once saw her kill a gecko by spraying it with Raid. It was an awful death. I just hope I find that snake before she does. I probably will, because there's not much chance she'll go looking for it.

Labels: home

Cos-mo-pol-i-tan: 1. belonging to all the world; not limited to the politics, interests or prejudices of one part of the world. 2. of or characteristic of a cosmopolite; worldly; sophisticated...3. completely absorbed in one's self; vain; 4. completely obsessed with one's own sexual persona; promiscuous; 5. complete lack of interest in anything other than 3 or 4.

I made up 3, 4 and 5, but somebody had to do it. Meanings change, and dictionaries have trouble keeping pace. The cover of the current magazine advertises an interview with a girl named Pink: "The Most Badass Chick We've Ever Interviewed." Pink is on the cover. I don't know who Pink is, as in I've never heard of Pink. Pink's wearing a tight grey skirt seemingly held together by metal rods. Her hair is cut very short, like a guy's. It's an unnatural silvery color. The v-neck of her tight grey skirt plunges to her solar plexus. I don't know why she's a badass. When I was growing up, I never heard a girl described that way.

Other articles advertised on the cover:

"100 Facts your Gyno Should Have Told You." This sounds medically useful. But if your gyno is leaving out so many facts, maybe you should consider changing doctors. And, just out of curiosity, what do you need him/her for other than subscriptions for birth control pills?

"Caught With Their Pants Down: you'll die laughing...and vow to lock the door." Frankly, I don't want to know the details, but at least the theme is familiar.

"Sexy New Hair and Makeup Looks." Remove the first word and nobody will read it.

"Stuck in Neutral? Gutsy Little Moves that Will Make Your Life Awesome." Don't bother. This is the only one in which the theme's not familiar. Besides, your life's already awesome. You're a Cosmo girl.

"75 Sex Tips from Guys: Sizzling, Sinful, and Surprising Things They're Craving Now." Get serious. No guy knows more than one or two things, so I'm figuring these tips came from 75 different guys, and that by the time you get to number 10 we're well on the road to perversion. Since the descriptive "Sinful" is sort of a major theme of the magazine, you're probably not put off by it. But if a guy wants to do something to you that you find "surprising," I'd suggest you get out of the building. I say this because "surprising" is likely a euphemism for "shocking," which they will not use to avoid passing judgement upon other people's sexual perversions. Or should that be 'preferences'?

I'm just guessing because I haven't read the article. It might be chock full of 75 perfectly harmless things, like handholding and butterfly kisses, that reinforce the sacred and immortal love between you and the men of your dreams, the ones to whom you are not married and with whom you hope to avoid having any children. I just don't like the odds.

The last one is "Girl Traits No Man Can Resist," the most important of which (IMO) is that you actually are a girl. As a teenager I always felt lucky when the person I put my arm around in the movie theater was a girl. Of course, this magazine is not written for teenagers but grown women, although the terms "men" and "women" do not show up on the cover, just 'girls' and 'guys.' Anyway, if you're one of those women-girls, one, that is, whose interests are not particularly wide-ranging (cosmopolitan) this might be the magazine for you.

This one's kind of hard to take.

In the 2004 U.S. Women's Open, Bernadette and Erica played their first two rounds together. (Neither girl made the cut.) Both girls' fathers caddied for them. In December of that year, both went through the same Q-school and won their LPGA cards as fully exempt players. In June of 2005, at the LPGA Championship in Havre de Grace, Md., we ran into Erica in the lobby of our motel, so Bern invited her to dinner. She accepted and seemed delighted to have someone to hang out with. On the course she was fiercely competitive (testimony to which, not all of it flattering, I can give but will not), but off the course could be quite engaging. She was blessed with a big bright smile. I got the sense that evening of someone mildly struggling to put herself at ease with her company, of trying to enjoy a 'normal' moment, but maybe I read too much into it. It might have been due merely to my presence. Fathers are conversation inhibitors.

I took a picture of her and Bern in front of the motel, but now I can't find it.

Another memory sticks in the mind. A few weeks later at the U.S. Open at Cherry Hills in Denver, we ran into Erica on the driving range. She and Bern hugged, of course, and then Bern asked her what time she teed off. Well, it turned out that during qualifying she had finished as an alternate, and was hanging around hoping that a spot would open up. It didn't. She had traveled a long way from somewhere just on a hope.

Like Paula Creamer, she had been one of those young phenoms just before the arrival of Michele Wie. She was a two time All-American at Arizona, and a Curtis Cup player. She had one good year on tour; the others were a struggle. This current year she had conditional status, which means waiting around for a phone call telling you that there's a spot open because the field didn't fill, or playing Monday qualifiers. It's a miserable grind either way. Nevertheless, she had recently qualified for a tournament in Mexico, Lorena Ochoa's curtain call, and had finished 44th.

I got another impression, too: that Erica didn't have many friends on Tour, keeping mostly to herself. (There is testimony to this as well.) But Bernadette was her friend, and liked her a lot. That friend is at the moment stunned by the news, and busy recalling all the times they ate out together, played practice rounds and pro-ams together, and equally busy trying to understand.

Erica Blasberg was 25. There's a story here; the authorities aren't saying much about the circumstances, for it appears an investigation is underway. God rest her.

Expressing reservations about the prospects for Christian empire:

The Emperor has become a Christian - the Devil has not.