In one scene from Annie Hall, Alvy (Woody Allen) finds his argument with Annie (Diane Keaton) cut short by a blowhard who invokes the name and work of Marshall MacLuhan in a harangue he’s delivering to his own date. Fed up, Alvy ducks off-camera and returns with none other than MacLuhan himself in tow. “I heard what you were saying,” MacLuhan tells the loudmouth. “You know nothing of my work. You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you ever... Read more
Never snort coke with a choleric. I learned that lesson during my misspent youth, which is to say my early 30s. But I came by the jargon to express it properly just yesterday, thanks to the Reverend Conrad Hook, author of The Four Temperaments, and to Diane Korzieniewski, who was nice enough to link to the piece from her Te Deum Laudamus blog. Backed by a nihil obstat, Hook revitalizes humorism, a model for the human personality expounded by Hippocrates... Read more
The very day I wrote in praise of Catholic doodads, a friend of mine, having reached me on Skype, aimed her webcam at her own morning’s plunder, which included a Miraculous Medal, a Rosary, and a wooden, dashboard-sized statue of Mary as Queen of Heaven. In terms of quality, it was average, the kind of stuff you settle for when your cat or your kids give you reason to fear you’ll soon have to replace it. But several facts gave... Read more
Today in Slate, pour épater la bourgeoisie, Allison Benedikt tells her readers: “You are a bad person if you send your children to private school.” Bad American is what Benedikt really means. As far as she’s concerned, our nation’s public school system will have a chance of improvement only given upper-middle class investment. “In many underresourced schools,” she writes, “it’s the aggressive PTAs that raise the money for enrichment programs and willful parents who get in the administration’s face when... Read more
Making the rounds on Facebook is a photo of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith and their children taken while they watched Miley Cyrus perform at the Video Music Awards. Everyone looks aghast. Jaden, the son, is wincing like a man who feels a lamb vindaloo dinner coming back to haunt him. This much is to be expected. The Pinkett-Smiths homeschool their kids, presumably, among other reasons, in order to insulate them from whatever cultural virus makes people strip down... Read more
Joseph Bottum’s essay, “The Things We Share: A Catholic’s Case for Gay Marriage,” is long. Very long. On its way to and from its point, that preventing the legalization of same-sex marriage “ought to come low on [the Church’s] list of priorities,” it zigs and zags — from Bottum’s personal history, through recent Supreme Court decisions, Natural Law, and the backstage wrangling that preceded the release of the Manhattan Declaration. People who grasp these subjects more firmly than I are... Read more
In In Praise of Shadow, Junichiro Tanizaki…well, praises shadow. He likes how partial darkness creates ambiguity that lets his imagination romp off leash. Tanizaki even prefers his food dark. Eat yokan, or red bean paste, in a dark room from a dark lacquer dish, and “it is as if the very darkness of the room were melting on your tongue.” Nom, nom. Tanizaki may be right that darkness is best friend to aesthetes, foodies, and heathens. But for neurotics with... Read more
The Catholic Doodad Shop — not its real name — stands kitty-corner from the L.A. Fitness where I work out. It’s also about two miles northwest of the Pima reservation where I buy my tax-free cigarettes. (Though I’ve driven my monthly intake down below a carton, I still consider the discount worth the hike, even in summertime.) My parish church has no gift shop; in fact, as far as I can tell, no church between St. Mary’s Basilica in Central... Read more
Rod Dreher thinks Lynn Messina’s a bad mother, and he thinks that’s a hoot. In the New York Times’ Motherlode: Adventures in Parenting blog, Messina, a YA novelist, complains that her 4-year-old’s preschool teacher lets the girls cut ahead of the boys on the line to the bathroom every day before naptime. “A gentleman lets girls go first,” the boy explains. The mother calls it “his first lesson in sexism.” Zooming in on the part he finds “hilarious” — a... Read more
Fielding questions from the press on his way home from World Youth Day, Pope Francis skirted the issue of whether or not a “gay lobby” exists in the Vatican. His expression of support for Institutional Works of Religion prelate Monsignor Battista Ricca, who stands accused of carrying on affairs with men while representing the Vatican in Uruguay, was vague and tentative. But the pope did use the word “gay,” several times. He was speaking Italian, where, as in English, the... Read more
Diary of a Wimpy Catholic
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