Two recommendations:

1. “The Chorus,” or “Les Choristes,” on DVD from OP Library and elsewhere, a marvelous story about teaching kids and being a human being.  Cinematically, if I may be so bold, it’s very intelligent.  For instance, we see someone beckoning another and are NOT given the face of the one beckoned.  Rather, the camera remains on the beckoner as we wait for the other to heave into view.  Small thing, but telling as the movie continues and you realize you are not going to be treated as a TV-viewer, with all spelled out for you.  Neither is this film wantonly mysterious (read dumb).  Nor is time spent on face shots nervously wondering when the damn camera goes to something interesting.  See “Les Choristes.”

2. The Dennis Miller Show on WIND-AM in Chicago, also national.  Mid-day, competing nicely with Rush Limbaugh on WLS-AM.  Miller went all conservative after 9–11.  He’s excellent with language and has decided it hurts only when you DON’T laugh.  Rush laughs too, but I think Miller will wear better over a longer period.  Of course, either one has its limits, when one is well advised to send them on mute, which is a killer on radio, of course, and pursue one’s Times Literary Supplement over lunch in the kitchen.  A word to the wise is sufficient, I hope.  In any case, it’s all I have to offer.

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The Reid-Pelosi Initiative

If you read your Instapundit before I did, you already know about Dems’ get-tough policy on governments that violate what’s good, true, and beautiful in human affairs:

WASHINGTON (APUPI) In a new attempt to finally bring a rogue regime to heel, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced today that they plan to diplomatically isolate the White House.

It’s about time.  Read all about it at Transterrestrial Musings.

Verrrrry interesting items . . .

* Victorian sentimentality was the product of “an unnatural union of poetry and Puritanism.” – Hugh Kingsmill, Anthology of Invective and Abuse, Dial, 1929

* “Throwin’ up his little finger” means doing a lot of drinking, in fact coming home drunk, in Legends and Stories of Ireland, by Samuel Lover, an 1831 collection published anew in 2006 by Nonsuch (nonsuch-publishing.com). In story “New potatoes,” in which Dublin potato-seller Katty complains to herring-monger Sally of her Mike, who had come home drunk: He “was done to a turn,” she said, “like a mutton-kidney.”

* The word “dickens” = devil. My mother and her mother knew that when they called a kid “that little dickens” of said, “Isn’t he (or she) the dickens?” Thus James H. Montgomery, of Austin TX, translator of Don Quixote. In TLS letters 3/16/07.

* Time Mag worried about a coming ice age in its Nov. 13, 1972 issue. And again in its Jun. 24, 1974 issue. So did Newsweek on April 28, 1975 – “The Cooling World, by Peter Gwynne: “There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically” etc.

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Worshiping without tears

The main character in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, Evelyn Waugh’s 1957 novel based on his own experience published when he was 54, is a Roman Catholic who just when church leaders were urging worship as a corporate rather than private act, had “burrowed ever deeper into the rock” and when away from his home parish sought the “least frequented mass” and remained “aloof from” church organizations formed to meet the needs of the times. Called “a leading Catholic” by media, he was not conspicuous for his leadership. 


Some find that appalling, I’m sure, but I find it appealing.  Today’s RC worship represents capitulation to a personal, Protestant approach to piety.  Once the emphasis was on God and ceremony, now it’s on the priest.  He has become the main character, as performer.  We like this or that parish because the priest is a performer after our likes.  Once it mattered far less who said the mass.  Differences were muted by sheer force of ritual.  Personal, quirky additions or emendations were unheard of.  Now they are everywhere.  They are what give the priest-performer style.  He may not intend that, and he’s under the gun to perform.  So he does.


That said, the goal can still be there for the mass-sayer or celebrant if you insist.  He can ditch the folksy business, or the pseudo-scholarly or the innovative.  And he can be more matter-of-fact about it.  You wonder sometimes about the emotional stability of some.  They spill their guts and go all compassionate.  They are romantics when you get down to it.  But classicists have feelings too.  They just don’t go all sloppy about it.  Granted, the priest is in competition with a media-frenzied world, especially as on television.  But even there you can find clarity without bathos sometimes.  Even there the message is muted sometimes.  Priests should hit the mute more often, even sometimes shutting up, but at least toning things down.


And for starters, they should not open mass with that “Good morning” bit.  They are not running into us at the supermarket, they are leading worship.  Let them can the informality.


Later, from Reader D.:  I LOVE your suggestion that priests should hit mute. Hey, mute is Biblical: I must decrease so He can increase.  All the chummy baloney at Mass is the Phil Donahue syndrome. That’s when it started, and that’s when this generation of pastors were newbies. They learned to take their mikes down into the audience. Spare me!!!  I decided during the Triduum at the Monastery of the Holy Cross (which I enjoyed) that Gregorian Chant is over-rated. Who the heck hums Chant in their free time besides Brother Peter? It’s mathematics as music. Give me a little melody.  Watching a bit of the Easter vigil on EWTN with Pope Benedict, I discovered Latin is an equalizer. There was no German accent — just Latin.

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Muslim activist boldly answers critics in Chi Trib

Softball pitcher of the week award goes to Chi Trib’s Noreen Ahmed-Ullah for her 3/25/07 email interview with the Chicago CAIR director — Council on American-Islamic Relations. Her questions win her this accolade:

Why CAIR? What are CAIR’s projects? “Tell me a bit about you,” etc., all leading up to the really tough one, “What is the source of the latest criticism/accusations being against CAIR on the national level?” which have never been reported by Chi Trib (!) and which the CAIR man, Ahmen Rehab, answered with alacrity. 

Those are “urban legends,” he says, traceable to “a single and homogenous [sic, both as to misspelling and misuse: single things are always homogeneous] source of interlinked individuals and groups [some single source] with such deceptively benign names as the Investigative Project, the Middle East Forum, Jihad Watch and Americans Against Hate.”

They “typically flourish in the unmoderated [oh my], chaotic world of the blogosphere; they attempt to sell themselves to political and media circles as experts on Islam and terrorism and as patriots who are looking out for American interests.”

Not so, says Rehab, desperately seeking rehabbing with the help of Chi Trib.  Rather, they are “career Islamophobes who are deathly afraid of Muslim-American enfranchisement [they seek depriving Muslims of the right to vote?] and its possible effects on the Israeli lobby’s interests. [Italics added, and there’s the obligatory Israeli reference].

Chi Trib’s Ahmed-Ullah even gives a web address for further CAIR info.

Couldn’t she have asked him his favorite color or candy bar while she was at it? Do we maybe wonder if such amateurism might not be what Sam Zell has in mind when he speaks of his wanting his new property to be “relevant”?

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Why he used a manual typewriter

Kevin McGowin, a writer and teacher with two web sites and two computers who was only 30 years old when he wrote this, uses a manual typewriter for writing fiction.

I began this process in 1993, and by the next year had moved to typewriters almost exclusively–because I’m convinced it improves my writing, or at least makes it more like the platonic ideal of the writing I see in my mind’s eye that I would like to produce. And since I’ve made the shift back to the typewriter, I’ve written more and with more discipline, been less hasty and sloppy, and have seen improvement and now feel more confident.

Manual, not electric:

I found that I loved the lack of electricity, of not being “plugged in” to the wall, the feel of the hammers sculpting their shapes onto the paper.

How does it help?

I find my concentration enhanced, my sentences more taut, and by not being able to move around huge blocks of text I find myself more in tune with the narrative flow of the piece.

He’s an afficionado:

I use different machines for different kinds of writing–I’m writing this “personal essay” on my aforementioned first antique manual, a black 1940s Royal KM (like my initials–a famous novelist who admired my poetry gave it to me in 1993). It types small, and works well for essay-type writing. For correspondence, including cover and query letters to editors and publishers, I use a 1935 L.C. Smith upright–I love the way it forms numerals, and the click, the brisk action with which it forms its letters, which are larger than those of the Royal. People like to get letters typed on the Smith, I think–it’s personal, in this age of laser printed mass mailings and the letters are so clear. It types a little slow, which makes it perfect for letter writing, although you might not want to try a novel on it.

For his novels there’s “a beautiful and fast Underwood 11 that has a sound that reminds me of rain.”

Other writers also: novelist Don DeLillo uses a “1950s Olympia Deluxe, [which is] heavy for a portable, but . ..  fast and . . . accurate, a truly great writer’s machine.”

McGowin and his wife live in an apartment now, but look forward to owning “a Queen Anne-style house with hardwood floors and a working typewriter in every room . . . “

Alas, it won’t happen.  Shocking it was to come to the end of his later essay, “Why I Still Use a Manual Typewriter,” part of the beautiful site The Classic Typewriter Page, to read this:

Editor’s note: Kevin McGowin died in an accident on January 18, 2005. He will be missed by his friends and family, by me, and by his many readers on this site and elsewhere. –Richard Polt

May he rest in peace.  I’m stunned.

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Pratfall in Damascus, says Wash Post

Wash Post has Mrs. Pelosi in its sights:

The really striking development [in her attempt at “Kissingerian” shuttle diplomacy] is the attempt by a Democratic congressional leader to substitute her own foreign policy for that of a sitting Republican president. Two weeks ago Ms. Pelosi rammed legislation through the House of Representatives that would strip Mr. Bush of his authority as commander in chief to manage troop movements in Iraq. Now she is attempting to introduce a new Middle East policy that directly conflicts with that of the president. We have found much to criticize in Mr. Bush’s military strategy and regional diplomacy. But Ms. Pelosi’s attempt to establish a shadow presidency is not only counterproductive, it is foolish.

Not only this, she got the message from Olmert wrong, wrong, wrong.

The really urgent question is, is she as dumb as she looks right now?

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Score one for the lady of our house

Ms. Pelosi found support for her recent excellent adventure, it seems:

JERUSALEM – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit today to Syria – in which she called for dialogue with Damascus – was “brave” and “very appreciated” and could bring about “important changes” to America’s foreign policy, including talks with “Middle East resistance groups,” according to members of terror organizations here whose top leaders live in Syria.

One terror leader, Khaled Al-Batch, a militant and spokesman for Islamic Jihad, expressed hope Pelosi would continue winning elections, explaining the House speaker’s Damascus visit demonstrated she understands the Middle East.

I love the part where the terrorist wants Democrats to win.  Who would have thought it?

Read all about this: Chi Trib stories rock!

Just sat and read with pleasure two Chi Trib stories, one about Sam Zell, new owner of the company, the other about people moving out west where there’s land, lots of land under starry skies above, at half the price.  It’s goodbye, Naperville, this family of five, hello, Yorkville, where the local farmers are courteous but not full of welcome. 

Sam Zell, on the other hand, finds a welcome mat out for him at Chi Trib, to judge by this account of how as self-described “grave dancer” he is really a skilled physician for ailing enterprises.  Read them and decide with me that Trib can do a very nice thing when it wants: the stories grind no axe, are clear and interesting.  Readibility, yes.

Patrick T. Reardon and Charles Leroux did the moving-west story, Michael Oneal and David Greising did the Zell story.

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