In what experts are calling "really gay", my knees are too bony for me to be able to cross my legs without cutting off circulation to the opposite calf and foot. What's a guy gotta do? Caffeine hasn't got any hidden weight-loss side effects, has it?

The Real Question

Virgin books are the best! I just checked out the three-volume opera completa of the Scuola Siciliana from ye venerable CU library - third floor, on the right, where hides the minuscule Italian enclave (PQ to the izzle) - and they had to enter them into the computers and put check out tags inside the cover to stamp. The ribbon bookmarks were even all folded into the same page of each volume, and everything was marvelously shiny and new. Each page unturned, each word unplumbed: the whole experience is a little bit like getting married. It sometimes sucks being the only Medievalist Italian grad here, but at moments like these it seems very much worth it. The medieval collection and I, we have each other, and shouldn't that be enough?

To clarify, not that I would rather be married any of the Sicilian School notaries than to Jenny. Although that Frederick Jr. fellow was quite the looker, before he got old and died seven hundred and fifty years ago.

But quite apart from literature (if we can conceive of any state of reality worthy of the name that is not a purely literary ebulliation) what I really want to know is this: is "Lime in the Coconut" some kind of elaborate metaphor for a girl who gets knocked up?

Discuss.

The Fundies

It's not like I never write anything anymore; I just never think to post what I happen to be writing on my blog. So here is a brief thought on Fundamentalism.Whereas I grant that fundamentalism was in many ways a radical movement, the difference is that I consider this a compliment. I think it is their highest glory. The fundamentalists held the line when no-one else stood by them; they closed ranks and filled the gap and bore like men the shock and fury of the secular assault. They were giants of faith who blazed revolt against cloud-compelling modern pantheon and spat in its unholy eye, and we stand profoundly in their dept. They suffered for it, too: if not in chains and crosses like the early martyrs, then at least in an ostracism so complete it amounted to leprosy.

And for we who only stand upon their shoulders now to scorn their excesses, to look down upon them in judgement, is a very petty move indeed.

Meditations on a Foreign Sortie, Part the first

In which I dupe the German TSA

I have nothing against the Transportation Security Administration. They are a lovely organisation of patriots whose competence and value to these United States cannot be impugned. Also, please don't put me in prison. But the German variety has really got their number.

I was in Germany the other day, Dusseldorf to be precise, and more or less against my will. I blame Delta for this, as well as the fifth columnists in New York public transportation services. But I had had a long and tiring week, and was exhausted and a little sick. But when the stewardess started passing out medical forms before we landed, I knew it was time for subterfuge. Obviously, they were screening for der swine flu, and I was not about to be trapped in some German quarantine. So (and I admit this only because I have no plans ever to return - we don't have an extradition treaty with them, do we?) I lied. There were boxes to check with symptoms... and I left them all blank. Crazy. Then it was just a matter of striding nonchalantly through the phalanx of medical staff, handing off the form, and bluffing my way through customs. I also corrected the grammar of the English version, which I am sure they appreciated. Smooth criminal.

So having broken through to freedom, and feeling very much species: man of mystery, genus: international, I wended steadily outside, and proceeded to be lost for approximately the next fifty minutes.

To quote from Austen: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that an airport with the name of a city large enough to be interesting must be within convenient walking distance of said city. Leave it to Jerry to blow my tidy paradigm out of the water, just like the Lusitania. Apparently there is nothing close to Dusseldorf Airport except more Dusseldorf Airport, and finally in desperation I sought parley with a native.

I was vaguelly disappointed that she answered me in perfect English, as I had been concocting and declining a foolproof back-up plan that consisted of asking her in Latin. Germany, as everyone knows, has a laudable tradition of classical scholarship, and it goes without saying that airport employees would know the once-international language of business, culture and the Church.

But as I say she knew the modern one, and I finally and disappointedly found myself upon the metro.

Meditations on a Foreign Sortie, a Prologue

In which the Author asserts the relative Veracity of his Account

It's like the man said. With the possible exception of the made-up bits - because who really wants to read about me getting on a plane and eating peanuts whilst the world turns smoothly? - the vast majority of what follows shall be substantially the truth. At least from some conceivable perspective.

Hard Prayers

Our church has just begun a series on Habakkuk entitled "hard prayers" with the idea that the prophet's passionate, nigh accusatory address (and subsequent acceptance of the Divine prerogative of justice) represent a model for our own relationship to God's promises. This seems fine and lovely and quite necessary: we have not because we ask not, maybe the reason I am not so good a Christian as I might be is my own slothfulness in expecting God to change me.

What I want to know is, how about the other hard prayers in Scripture? For example, I was reading in Judges yesterday and ran across the song of Deborah, where she basically spends a couple verses making fun of Sisera's mom's soon-to-be devasting grief over the prospect of her virile warrior son lying with a spike crushed through his head. Am I allowed to pray like that? Seems downright uncharitable somehow.

Perhaps it goes along with the temporal context of holy war: no-one argues that today it's alright for me to sack Jerusalem and burn it with fire, or to pig-stick fat despots, even if I am left-handed. Likewise, the reasoning would go, I have no right to wish that sort of distress on anyone, let alone celebrate the fact.

On the other hand, that line of reasoning also rules out a good many Psalms, and maybe one or two things that Paul says in re, for example, high priests and smiting. And what about the damned? Ought we to say their condemnation is just... and yet be brokenhearted?

Religion and Politics

And other topics for when the company comes over.

In light of recent events (by which I mean "I was thinking in the shower this morning") I have decided to become a-political. The amount of time I spend reading newsmagazines, following opinion journalists, and bemoaning the state of the union is absurd. (Not to mention the amount of time I spent playing Diplomacy online when I should ought to have been writing papers last semester... does that count as political involvement? What about Risk? Discuss.) These things are not important. I'm not invested in America, or at least I shouldn't be: we are citizens of a heavenly kingdom. I suppose I might still vote...

The fallacy of Firefly

In a parodic application of the scholarly credentials I one day hope to win, I read a book of theoretical essays on the failed yet awesome Joss Whedon television show Firefly. Jenny and I recently finished watching the season on Hulu, culminating with the feature film, and now in feverish avoidance of actual work, rather than some sensible divertissemente like playing Frisbee, I spend my time critiquing the barely literate.

Not that the essays are terribly written: they're about what one would expect from TV fanatics, which is to say profoundly lacking in references to Augustine and the Scholastic renaissance. (This is my standard essay format. Point 1: Author X tries to show Y. Point 2: Here is how Dante does the same thing, better, in terza rima. Conclusion: Author X should give up.) But there is a pervasive and aggravating fallacy that they seem to share with Whedon which drives me nuts.

One of the show's most common tropes is the absolute denial of transcendence. Captain Malcolm Reynolds is at his best confronting an abstract principle of some variety - best seen in the movie in the person of the Operative, but also in now-deceased character of Book - and denying it in favour of an immanent situational requirement. As Nathan Fillion, the actor who played him, said, "Mal didn't have any grand dreams, he didn't have any great causes or goals." Unlike, say, the Operative, (citing Eric Greene) whose "ideals have been severed from the true values that arise from lived human experience: the need for self-determination, the importance of dissent, the simple moral imperative that children should not be kidnapped, killed, or turned into killers... faith, in the eyes of Serenity's aethist writer/director, is a problem."

So instead of faith in abstract ideals, which as we learn from the series is pretty much synonymous with setting teenagers on fire and authorising large-scale massacres, Mal upholds pragmatic, tangible values such as freedom of the press? How about the Fourteen points, while you're at it, or the three-word motto of the Jacobins? It is such tiresome lapses of reason - or rather the complete absence of thought - which stain what might otherwise have been a clever, even brilliant show. Sigh.