Uncategorized | dual personalities

January 27, 2018

Young boys should never be sent to bed. They always wake up a day older.*

by chuckofish

Even when you don’t send your boy to bed, he sometimes just falls asleep wherever he happens to be — in this case, curled up against the family room wall, lying on top of the TV remote.

I found this picture yesterday, while tidying up my desk at work.

Then “time like an ever-flowing stream” does its work…and before you know it, he’s a 22 year old Yukon Cornelius!

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Aside from finding old photos of my darling youngest son, I didn’t do much this week besides fill out paperwork and go to meetings. I finished reading Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety. As it involves major historical figures of the French Revolution, it contains no surprises — everyone gets guillotined — yet, even so, she manages to make it heart-rending:

There is the world and there is the shadow-world; there is the world of freedom and illusion, and then there is the real world, in which we watch, year by year, the people we love hammer on their chains.

Having finished that book, I am now reading something that a friend lent me: Philip Kerr’s Berlin Noir trilogy about a private detective in 1930s Berlin — not exactly a shift to the lighter side!

Although I haven’t read very much, I’m a little put off by Kerr’s dogged but not quite successful effort to be Raymond Chandler. On the plus side, I’m encouraged by the reviewer’s comment in the New Yorker: “one thing I like about [Kerr] is that he makes bad behavior look bad again.” And he’s Scottish, so that’s another plus. I’ll let you know…

It should be a quiet weekend, at least for me. Boy #1 is doing double shifts. During the week he’s a juror in a sensational murder trial (about which I can say no more) and on the weekend he’s a frenetic line cook at our local hotel. There’s no rest for that weary lad — he may end up falling asleep wherever he happens to be. If so, I’ll try to get a picture…

Have a wonderful weekend and get some rest!

*J.M. Barrie

2 Comments

January 26, 2018

Let angels prostrate fall*

by chuckofish

Friday at last–what a long week it has been! The highlight of mine was when daughter #1 came home Wednesday night because she had business in town on Thursday.

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That was a fun, but short, diversion for me! Nothing like a mid-week wine & gab session.

A quiet weekend of puttering is fine with me. Hopefully we will see the wee babes for our usual Sunday night family dinner.

Miss Lottie looks so grown up with her four teeth!

The wee bud says, “I have a tooth too!”

I will note one historical milestone happening this weekend: Saturday is the anniversary of the dedication ceremonies of the New County Meeting House of the Ethical Society of St. Louis (designed by Harris Armstrong) in 1965.

The Ethical Society of St. Louis was organized in 1886 under the leadership of Walter L. Sheldon. Meetings, services and Sunday School were conducted in the Museum of Fine Arts at Nineteenth and Locust streets, where social and settlement work projects were also instituted. Under Sheldon’s direction the Self-Culture Hall Association came into being. (“Self-Culture”?) After his death, members of the Ethical Society erected the Sheldon Memorial in his name in 1912 and it served as the society’s meeting place until the move to the new Mid-Century Modern structure. In its heyday speakers such as Margaret Mead, Thurgood Marshall, R. Buckminster Fuller, Norman Cousins and Martha Gellhorn spoke from its stage and the St. Louis Chapter of the League of Women Voters was founded in The Sheldon’s Green Room. The Sheldon is now a concert venue and art gallery.Today the Ethical Society, located in an upscale neighborhood in west county, offers “Sunday School” and nursery school for children and adult education classes on various topics including a book of the month club, chorus, discussion on current events, ethical circles, ethical mindfulness meditation and other discussion groups. A Humanist congregation, they “affirm human dignity, celebrate reason, and work together for social change.” It is a “place where people come together to explore the biggest questions of life without reference to scripture, religion, or God.”

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I see from their Instagram that their congregation appears to be as old and gray as any mainline Christian group. LOL.

Phooey!

Well, in honor of the ethical humanists, I will go to church on Sunday and to our Annual Meeting.

(It is interesting to note that the Church of the Immacolata, located across the street from the Ethical Society and built two years later, chose this scripture for their cornerstone:

In your face, ethical humanists!

Have a great weekend!

*”All Hail the Power of Jesus Name” by Edward Perronet (1779)

4 Comments

January 25, 2018

Running on divine momentum

by chuckofish

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Somewhere in my reading recently I ran across the book Morte d’Urban by J.F. Powers, which won the National Book Award in 1963. (It was re-issued in 2000 by the New York Review of Books Classics series.) I had never heard of “this comic masterpiece” or its author. Upon doing a little research, I discovered that he was an American novelist and short-story writer “who often drew his inspiration from developments in the Catholic Church, and was known for his studies of Catholic priests in the Midwest. Although not a priest himself, he [was] known for having captured a “clerical idiom” in postwar North America.” I found it in my university library and checked it out.

This cover art makes no sense.

It seemed to him that the Order of St Clement labored under the curse of mediocrity, and had done so almost from the beginning. In Europe, the Clementines hadn’t (it was always said) recovered from the French Revolution. It was certain that they hadn’t ever really got going in the New World. Their history revealed little to brag about-one saint (the Holy Founder) and a few bishops of missionary sees, no theologians worthy of the name, no original thinkers, not even a scientist. The Clementines were unique in that they were noted for nothing at all. They were in bad shape all over the world. The Chicago province was probably better off than the others, but that wasn’t saying much. Their college was failing, their high schools were a breakeven proposition at best, and their parishes, except for a few, were in unsettled parts of Texas and New Mexico where no order in its right mind would go. The latest white elephant was an abandoned sanitarium in rural Minnesota! But that was typical of Father Boniface and the rest of them. They just didn’t know a bad thing when they saw it-or a good one.

A book about such an Order has possibilities. It could be hilarious. But unfortunately, Morte d’Urban is merely excruciating. The minor characters are not lovable, they are just annoying, and the hero–a priest with actual talent, but no real spiritual life–is not likable enough. I am not sure what to make of him. The irony of a talented, misused man laboring in a two-bit Order is lost when you realize that as a Christian, he shouldn’t care. And what is he good at really? Fund-raising? Indeed, we never really understand what motivates the hero. He does not seem to do anything out of religious fervor, love of the church or God. He seems to be driven by self-esteem. He makes one hanker for a priest like the one in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, who knows he is a bad priest:

“What an unbearable creature he must have been in those days–and yet in those days he had been comparatively innocent. That was another mystery: it sometimes seemed to him that venial sins–impatience, an unimportant lie, pride, a neglected opportunity–cut you off from grace more completely than the worst sins of all. Then, in his innocence, he had felt no love for anyone; now in his corruption he had learnt.”

Powers appears to have been too good a Catholic to really let go and be critical. He lays it all out–the priests who are not “called” to their work, who just want to get through the day with the least output of effort and then watch television; and their superiors who desire the same (just in a nicer setting) and seem to want to punish any priest who might outshine them. But he never asks why this is the situation. One feels that there should be at least one character who is not afraid to be openly critical of the Powers That Be.

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I can’t help seeing this as a movie–starring, you know, Bing Crosby as the go-getting priest, and Barry Fitzgerald, Regis Toomey and Pat O’Brien in supporting parts. There doesn’t seem to be more to it and those actors’ participation would add some likability to the characters.

Am I missing something? Well, I am going to finish it, because I am curious to see where it is going. To call it a comic masterpiece is really over-selling it. Has anyone read it?

You might be interested in reading this about J.F. Powers and his obit in the NYT.

The painting at the top is “Woman Reading on a Settee” by William W. Churchill (American, 1858-1926)

3 Comments

January 24, 2018

No ironic laughter

by chuckofish

“Have no anxiety about anything,” Paul writes to the Philippians. In one sense it is like telling a woman with a bad head cold not to sniffle and sneeze so much or a lame man to stop dragging his feet. Or maybe it is more like telling a wino to lay off the booze or a compulsive gambler to stay away from the track.

Is anxiety a disease or an addiction? Perhaps it is something of both. Partly, perhaps, because you can’t help it, and partly because for some dark reason you choose not to help it, you torment yourself with detailed visions of the worst that can possibly happen. The nagging headache turns out to be a malignant brain tumor. When your teenage son fails to get off the plane you’ve gone to meet, you see his picture being tacked up in the post office among the missing and his disappearance never accounted for. As the latest mid-East crisis boils, you wait for the TV game show to be interrupted by a special bulletin to the effect that major cities all over the country are being evacuated in anticipation of nuclear attack. If Woody Allen were to play your part on the screen, you would roll in the aisles with the rest of them, but you’re not so much as cracking a smile at the screen inside your own head.

Does the terrible fear of disaster conceal an even more terrible hankering for it? Do the accelerated pulse and the knot in the stomach mean that, beneath whatever their immediate cause, you are acting out some ancient and unresolved drama of childhood? Since the worst things that happen are apt to be the things you don’t see coming, do you think there is a kind of magic whereby, if you only can see them coming, you will be able somehow to prevent them from happening? Who knows the answer? In addition to Novocain and indoor plumbing, one of the few advantages of living in the twentieth century is the existence of psychotherapists, and if you can locate a good one, maybe one day you will manage to dig up an answer that helps.

But answer or no answer, the worst things will happen at last even so. “All life is suffering” says the first and truest of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, by which he means that sorrow, loss, death await us all and everybody we love. Yet “the Lord is at hand. Have no anxiety about anything,” Paul writes, who was evidently in prison at the time and with good reason to be anxious about everything, “but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.”

He does not deny that the worst things will happen finally to all of us, as indeed he must have had a strong suspicion they were soon to happen to him. He does not try to minimize them. He does not try to explain them away as God’s will or God’s judgment or God’s method of testing our spiritual fiber. He simply tells the Philippians that in spite of them-even in the thick of them-they are to keep in constant touch with the One who unimaginably transcends the worst things as he also unimaginably transcends the best.

“In everything,” Paul says, they are to keep on praying. Come Hell or high water, they are to keep on asking, keep on thanking, above all keep on making themselves known. He does not promise them that as a result they will be delivered from the worst things any more than Jesus himself was delivered from them. What he promises them instead is that “the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”

The worst things will surely happen no matter what-that is to be understood-but beyond all our power to understand, he writes, we will have peace both in heart and in mind. We are as sure to be in trouble as the sparks fly upward, but we will also be “in Christ,” as he puts it. Ultimately not even sorrow, loss, death can get at us there.

That is the sense in which he dares say without risk of occasioning ironic laughter, “Have no anxiety about anything.” Or, as he puts it a few lines earlier, “Rejoice in the Lord always. Again I will say, Rejoice!”

(Philippians: 4:4-7)

–Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark

I had another post ready to go last night, but I decided, after thinking about it, that it wasn’t ready to go quite yet. So Fred Buechner to the rescue. He’s just the best.

Have a good Wednesday and have no anxiety about anything.

4 Comments

January 23, 2018

A prayer for today

by chuckofish

O God:

Give me strength to live another day;
Let me not turn coward before its difficulties
or prove recreant to its duties;

Let me not lose faith in other people;
Keep me sweet and sound of heart, in spite of
ingratitude, treachery, or meanness;
Preserve me from minding little stings or
giving them;

Help me to keep my heart clean, and to live so
honestly and fearlessly that no outward failure
can dishearten me or take away the joy of
conscious integrity;

Open wide the eyes of my soul that I may see
good in all things;

Grant me this day some new vision of thy truth;
Inspire me with the spirit of joy and gladness;

And make me the cup of strength to suffering
souls; in the name of the strong Deliverer,
our only Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

–Phillips Brooks

The Episcopal Church remembers Phillips Brooks, priest and bishop, annually on January 23, the anniversary of his death. He is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery–the first “garden cemetery” in America–in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Edwin Booth is buried there too, as is Louis Agassiz, geologist, zoologist; Mary Baker Eddy, “discoverer of the principles of Christian Science”; Fannie Farmer, who wrote the cookbook; Isabella Stewart Gardner, whose home is a museum now; Oliver Wendell Holmes, essayist; Winslow Homer, painter, Julia Ward Howe, who wrote the words to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow…and many more.

Boston is not high on my places to visit, but who knows? I would like to take a look at this cemetery.

5 Comments

January 22, 2018

Snowmen prophets of doom

by chuckofish

I kept getting interrupted every time I sat down to write this post yesterday, which was par for the course as my plans kept changing all weekend. But c’est la vie.

I had a good weekend even though I ended up not doing much. I watched a couple of great movies–Allegheny Uprising (1939) and To Have and Have Not (1944)–and the OM hooked up the new DVD player so we could finally watch Hell Is For Heroes (1962) which he got in his Christmas stocking. (It would not play on our old DVD player.) It is not the greatest movie–it is kind of like an extended Combat! episode–but beggars can’t be choosers when it comes to SMcQ movies. And Bobby Darin was pretty great too.

I went to church on Sunday and read the Prayers of the People. The temperature got up to 63-degrees (not a record) and everyone in town was out and about. It smelled like spring! The old January Thaw.

The wee babes came over for dinner with their parents on Sunday night.

And here’s a song from ol’ Tom Petty that I like:

Have a good week back at the salt mine.

5 Comments

January 20, 2018

Stoic Saturday

by chuckofish

The DH gave me Ryan Holiday’s The Daily Stoic for Christmas.

Each daily entry starts with a quotation from such greats as Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus, followed by the author’s brief commentary. Every evening after dinner the DH reads the day’s selection aloud to James and me, and then we discuss it. It’s very informal and a lot of fun. If we miss a night, we just catch up the next day. Among other things, the book reminds those of us having trouble dealing with today’s world that things were ever thus, if not actually much worse.

Take poor Seneca (4 BC-65 AD), for example. Born into a prominent Roman family, Seneca made a splash in the Senate, but drew the ire of the Emperor Caligula, who promptly ordered him to commit suicide. Only the fact that Seneca was already gravely ill and expected to die saved him. Caligula’s death in 41 AD did not solve Seneca’s problems, for Messalina, wife of the new Emperor, Claudius, accused Seneca of having an affair with Caligula’s sister.

Would you have an affair with this man?

As a result, Seneca was exiled to Corsica, where he remained until 49 AD, when Agripinna, Claudius’ sister, had him recalled to tutor her son, Nero, the guy who, as Emperor, would fiddle while Rome burned. Things did not turn out well for Seneca.

By 54 Nero had become Emperor. At first, Seneca advised young Nero and everything seemed to be going well.

Not a willing pupil. Nero-and-Seneca Converse by Eduardo-Barron. Prado-Museum

Eventually, the paranoid emperor accused Seneca of conspiring to murder him (Nero), and forced the unfortunate philosopher to commit suicide. That’s what you get for hobnobbing with the rich and powerful.

Whatever Seneca’s personal failures, he was a great thinker and writer. He found a way to deal with life’s challenges — and certainly he faced a lot of those. When you feel overwhelmed or powerless, consider reading the Stoics. As Epictetus wrote in his Discourses (2.5.4-5):

The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control.

In other words, there’s no point getting upset about things you can’t control. Concentrate on what you can control, namely, yourself. As good old Seneca said, “the happy life is to have a mind that is free, lofty, fearless and steadfast” (Essays and Letters).

Sounds good to me.

Be free, lofty, fearless and steadfast this weekend!

4 Comments

January 19, 2018

Birthday girls

by chuckofish

Today is our mother’s birthday. She would have been 92! It seems impossible that she has been gone thirty years. Well, gone, but certainly not forgotten.

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“There is so little to remember of anyone – an anecdote, a conversation at a table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming habitual fondness not having meant to keep us waiting long.”

–Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

This year I will turn the age our mother was when she died. It is a strange feeling.

I believe in life, which one day each of us shall lose. When we are young we think we won’t, that we are different. As a child I thought that I would never grow up, that I could will it so. And then I realized, quite recently, that I had crossed some line, unconsciously cloaked in the truth of my chronology. How did we get so damn old?

–Patti Smith, M Train

Yes, indeed, how did we get so damn old?

I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees and her book in my hands. Like a lot of things in my life, I’d just about worn it out, but it was worn out with love, and that’s the best kind of worn-out there is. Maybe we’re like all those used cars, broken hand tools, articles of old clothing, scratched record albums, and dog-eared books. Maybe there really isn’t any such thing as mortality; that life simply wears us out with love.

–Craig Johnson, Kindness Goes Unpunished

Well, I didn’t mean to get all serious, but, you know, sometimes we do.

P.S. Big congratulations to our other birthday girl Dolly Parton,
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who was recognized in the Guinness World Records 2018 edition for earning the records for most decades with a Top 20 hit on the US Country Songs chart as well as most hits on the U.S. Hot Country Songs chart by a female artist. You go, girl!

Hey, it’s Friday! Have a good weekend!

5 Comments

January 18, 2018

Throwback Thursday

by chuckofish

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Did you know that Lillie Langtry visited St. Louis in January, 1883? Well, she did and she caused quite a stir. St. Louisans, we are told, were “agog over her presence” and why wouldn’t they be? Oscar Wilde, it was said, was inspired by her beauty to write Lady Windemere’s Fan. Daughter of an Anglican dean, the Very Reverend William Corbet Le Breton, Langtry was one of the first international superstars.

When Col. A.B. Cunningham, an editor of the St. Louis Globe Democrat, was denied access to her quarters at the Southern Hotel for an interview, he stormed past her servants to find the lady breakfasting en negligee with Fred Gebhard, her manager. The Globe ran a scathing story about the actress, claiming that her success was due soley to her notoriety and urging St. Louisans to ban her stage performances as a protection to the city’s morals. Gebhard called Cunningham an infamous liar, whereupon Cunningham challenged him to a duel. After Lillie persuaded Fred not to accept, Cunningham posted placards around town denouncing him as a coward. The city’s other newspapers had a grand time writing of the whole affair, and Lillie’s performances were sold out.

Some things never change, right? Our expectations of the press certainly…

Anyway, all this talk of Lillie Langtry made me think of the The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972) which stars Paul Newman as the infamous Bean,

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who is obsessed with “the Jersey Lilly”. Langtry is played by the beautiful Ava Gardner, who makes a cameo appearance at the end of the film.

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The movie, directed by John Huston, is a bit strange, but I saw it again recently and I enjoyed it. There is a lot of humor in the screenplay by John Milius, but the underlying tone is sad and elegiac and the music by Maurice Jarre supports that. Paul Newman raises the bar once again. So if you are looking for something to watch, check it out.

Meanwhile I’ll raise a toast tonight to the lovely Lille Langtry.

(Information regarding Langtry’s visit to St. Louis from Frances Hurd Stadler, St. Louis Day By Day)

2 Comments

January 17, 2018

“If you want to be neutral, move to Switzerland.”

by chuckofish

I have been following the Madcap Cottage gents for years it seems, long before they were even on Instagram.

I love their vibe. They like elephants and needlepoint and chinoiserie. They like to reupholster vintage furniture with good bones in jazzy fabric. They love a good estate sale or flea market find. They like collections.

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Last week I finally bought their book which was released last fall.

I like wiling away an hour or two looking at a decorating book full of lovely photographs of beautiful rooms, don’t you?

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This book is full of good advice as well as pretty pictures, advice from the gents and from their style icons: Sister Parrish, Dorothy Draper, David Hicks, etc.

Dip your toe into the world of pattern mixing and throw caution to the wind by setting your dining table with mismatched china. Not only is this an easy way to explore the power of pattern, it also will give your dining room a fresh look without a makeover.

Haven’t I been saying this for years?

Anyway, I think the gents would approve of my recent decorating choices, especially my dining room wallpaper:

and my newest estate sale renovation:

So take this as a reminder to do what pleases you when it comes to decorating your home. You live there. Outside of work, it is where you spend most of your time, right?

Right. Have fun feathering your nest. “Be brave, be bold, be gutsy!” The gents would approve.

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