MOMMENTARY |
|||
|
Tuesday, August 19, 2003 ( 9:23 PM ) Elinor Dashwood A coincidence. Here was I just blogging about its being, on the whole, a good thing that Aida and Rhadames were sealed up in a tomb, as he would eventually have started to beat her up, when the subject of wifely submission came up on one or two blogs I read. I don't know whether I'm submissive or not - probably not. I don't lie to Cacciaguida and I don't moan about things that don't turn out as I would have liked, but I can't picture myself not participating in discussions about matters affecting the family. In any case, I think wifely submission is fine, as long as it is the wife who decides to do it. I'd be uncomfortable around any man who didn't regard it, at least in part, as an adorable quirk of his wife's. I make absolutely no generalization from the few cases that have come under my notice - there may be husbands by the thousands insisting on wifely obedience, and yet doing so with perfect charity, discretion, and maturity. But the only three men I've ever met who talked a big line on wifely submission ended up beating their wives. I don't say, or even surmise, that you, Mr. Brown, or you, Mr. Smith, knock the little woman about when she doesn't come up to standard. I do say, however, that in the only three cases that have passed within my personal observation, husbands who had an immature and hostile desire for mastery found in the dictum from Ephesians a perfect excuse for exacting slavish service and silent obedience to their every behest, and enforcing their demands with beatings. So I am, to say the least, uneasy on this subject; and any young man who comes round to see my daughter and starts talking about wifely submission will find himself on one ear in the gutter before he knows what hit him. # ( 11:42 AM ) Elinor Dashwood We listened to Aida last night. It's rather a favorite with me, being highly whistleable and entirely free of any pretensions to Significance. One thing I don't like about it is the cringing and whimpering of its eponymous character, a nauseously helpless Ethiopian princess enslaved in Egypt. I grant that she's a slave, but a highly favored one; in any case, however little she could do to change her situation, she might at least meet her troubles with a measure of courage and dignity. She's in love (hate that expression) with the hero, Rhadames; so is her mistress, Amneris. From the point of view of reality, of course, this is a non-situation: obviously Rhadames would marry Amneris and keep Aida as a concubine. There's no sense, however, in looking for reality in operas; one might just as well give the thing up and read a book. (I generally do.) Anyway, Aida is a drip, always sobbing "Oh, Amneris!" and "Oh, Daddy!" and invariably caving in to whoever yells at her the loudest. Anyway, her father (a captive from Rhadames' successful campaign to conquer Ethiopia) bullies her into cajoling Rhaddie to tell her what route his army will take in its next foray, so Pop's army (last seen in chains during the triumphal march - don't ask me how he means to lead them anywhere) can cut them off and free Ethiopia. Aida's big aria comes in here - "O patria mia", although Cacciaguida says perhaps I have a point and it ought to be called "O povera mia". She entraps her swain into revealing the information, whereupon Pop, who has been earwigging this interview from behind the nearest sphinx, jumps up and yells in triumph. (They really ought to have told him in Spy School that your accomplished undercover man doesn't spring out from hiding and do the Victory Jig while the dupe is still standing there.) The gaff blown, Rhadames, ever the honorable soldier, calls for guards and turns himself in for treason. He refuses to defend himself, or to purchase his freedom by permitting Amneris to intercede for him, the price being his marrying her and ditching Aida. He is condemned to be buried alive in a tomb; Aida creeps into it and is sealed away in death with him at the end. And a good thing, too, because her shuddering and moaning would have gotten old in a hurry, and she's just the sort of woman whom men beat up. This isn't an acceptable thing to say in public, but it's long been my observation that quite a lot of men hit their wives - once. The wives who bash right back with the rolling pin, I suspect, don't get hit again. Anyway, it's a great opera, only I'd like it better if it were called Amneris, after the only one of the three major characters who has any steel in her. # Saturday, August 16, 2003 ( 3:03 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Right. My circuits are blown. While keeping up with Cacciaguida (ah, the trials of the dual-blog marriage) I followed a link to The Curt Jester, whom I must absolutely add to my blogwatch. The CJ was remarking on the Catholic portion of the observances in Memphis for Elvis Presley on the anniversary of his death. I've never been an Elvis fan, so I didn't know he had ever recorded a song in praise of the Blessed Virgin, called "The Miracle of the Rosary". Apparently a friend showed him the music, and he insisted on putting it at the top of the schedule of recordings. Truth is indubitably stranger than fiction. Having always felt a certain fastidious distaste for the press' annual mockery-fest of the excesses of Elvis-worship during the August commemoration season, I hesitate to appear to join in the catcalls. My excuse must be an abiding taste for the surreal in everyday life. Surrealism in art I find contrived and uninteresting, but I don't know when I've been more delighted by PBS than when, during a broadcast of a te Kanawa concert, Dame Kiri - an energetic promoter of her native Maori culture - brought on a New Zealand folk performance group kitted out in feathers, loincloths, shells, and all. I anticipated an interesting demonstration of aboriginal music and dance, but conceive my thrill when they instead sang backup for her in - are you ready for this? - "The Impossible Dream". So you see why I was staggered to follow the link above and hear The King singing a sort of country-pop take on an Ave Maria. Well, may he rest in peace; if he loved Our Lady he can't have been altogether off course. # Friday, August 15, 2003 ( 4:12 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Happy Feast of the Assumption! Two things occurred to me this morning. First, that it's more than usually unwise to speed on a Holy Day of Obligation, as the cop who pulls you over will very likely be an Evangelical Calvinist who will view with chilly disfavor your explanation that you're late for church. (Not that this happened to me, but it's worth bearing in mind.) The second came into my mind as I was seating myself in dull resignation after the Gospel and hoping the sermon wouldn't be too awful. (I took several of the children to the 9:30 at a nearby parish and was well rewarded for my sloth by getting Father Ah-Lay-LOO-Ya!, who I persist in thinking got the directions mixed up on his way to the Pentecostal seminary, and wound up becoming a Benedictine by mistake.) The sermon was pretty poor - this particular specimen generally preaches, regardless of the occasion, that JEE-SUS! is here WITH US! and so we shouldn't come to church with long faces; and today wasn't much different. (A more percipient man might begin to wonder why so many countenances are overspread with gloom when he officiates.) But then I realized that the Feast of the Assumption ought to be celebrated with particular rejoicing by the Dominicans, because the doctrine administers a much-deserved kick in the teeth to the Manichaeans. Flesh can't be evil of itself, or why would Our Lady have been assumed into Heaven, her body and soul in uninterrupted unity? So I've scrapped the initial plan for one of those easy but rather dreary meals one prepares when summer has become a stifling wasteland and cooking a penance, and we're going to doink the Cathars in the eye with antipasti, spaghetti carbonara (with plenty of eggs and cheese and bacon), pinot grigio, lemon cake, and strawberries. Salve, Salve, Salve Regina! # Thursday, August 14, 2003 ( 10:17 AM ) Elinor Dashwood As I've mentioned before, summer is not my season. I enjoy going to the beach, but even with relentless sunblocking I generally manage to get a bit burned. Fine, silky hair and fair, delicate skin were held, in my youth, to demonstrate Quality, and I am the complete west-of-Ireland type - I freckle rather than tan, and much of my circulatory system is visible from the outside. Considering everything, however, I'd willingly exchange a good deal of Quality for a bit more resilience in the matter of complexion and also hair. Once the fabled long-and-blond - and save the jokes, because the dumb blondes get to be blond by Art and not by Nature - I now wear it short because its extreme fineness won't bear a lot of brushing. Also because few things look sillier on a middle-aged matron than to wear her hair hanging all down her back. But I digress. As a rule in August I hang out in the air-conditioning, doing a great deal of needlework, and abandon all intellectual pursuits for a literary diet of popular biographies, true crime, and new mystery writers. Recent experiments have included Aaron Elkins' Gideon Oliver novels, Robert van Gulik's outstanding Judge Dee stories, and this year's favorite, Ellis Peters' medieval chronicles of Brother Cadfael. As to this last, the books are much better than the Derek Jacobi series on PBS' Mystery! program. (There, I knew I ought to have had that set up permanently in type, so to speak.) The Mystery! productions suffer from the PBS Effect, whereby a liberal savor works its way into everything. For instance, the Benedictine rule is made out, in the series, to be a set of tiresome restrictions which only the rebel Cadfael is able to appreciate as such - the rest of the monks being, of course, "ignorant, superstitious, and easily led" - and it's made out to be terribly brave and clever of him to disregard it when he chooses. In the books he's a much more complex and interesting character, and his persistent difficulties with the vow of obedience are understood even by himself to be a failing, and even a hindrance to his ability to understand the import of some of the clues he uncovers. Nor does Cadfael in the novels engage in the sort of modernist theology and feel-good moral assessments that too often mar the television production. In fact I have only two objections to the books. First, Shrewsbury seems to have been an unusually dangerous place to be, even by the standards of civil strife and the twelfth century; by my calculation somebody seems to turn up murdered about six times a month. Second, the author honors her debt to the classic country-house mystery - in which the inhabitants flit in and out of the locus in quo on unrelated private projects all night long, missing each other by seconds, and obligingly strewing their paths with shreds of clothing for the sleuth to find - by leaning rather heavily on overheard footsteps and whispered conversations, and causing many of the victims to assist the herbalist Cadfael by getting bits of rare plants caught in their hair or garments, thus demonstrating where and under what conditions they were killed. Other than that, they're really excellent, and I heartily recommend them. # Thursday, August 07, 2003 ( 11:06 PM ) Elinor Dashwood We're going to the Old Oligarch's party tomorrow so I'd better get straightened out about The Matrix. So, it's about these twin brothers suckled by a she-wolf, right? Who end up on an island full of lost boys, and a White Rabbit sends them to throw the One Ring into the main reactor on the Death Star, and . . . oh, skip it. # ( 11:32 AM ) Elinor Dashwood Oh, for crying out loud. Heaven knows I hate feminism, but feminists have, from time to time, made certain valid points, chief among which is that men's caring about what women look like is an idiotic residue of adolescence, and not to be encouraged. And don't talk to me about shiny hair and a trim figure being genetically-encoded indicators of youth and health and suitability for motherhood, as if that were an excuse: men are also genetically-encoded to tinkle outdoors and to scratch their armpits in public, and most of them have managed to get the better of that. What brings this on is a comment posted on Moss Place in response to Pansy's concern that readers who noted their interest in recipes might think they were "two huge women who can fit into nothing but muumuus and who sit at the computer all day because entry out the front door is almost impossible." In other words, it's a slight variation on the quintessential wifely anxiety, or "Does this blog make me look fat?" Why should they care if it does? They have families, friends, responsibilities - why do they care if somebody out in cyberspace gets a mistaken impression about their appearance? Why would they care if that same hypothetical reader approved of their appearance or not? Anyone who imagines that his opinion of a woman's looks makes a dime's worth of difference one way or the other should dry up. I've no time for those Catholic men - and there are some - who profess to admire a woman's character, purity, generosity, and goodness, and also think it would be great if she had a hot bod. Stuff it, turkeys. # Tuesday, August 05, 2003 ( 11:50 AM ) Elinor Dashwood Look at me, I'm blushing. Last night Cacciaguida put Mommentary into Technorati and came up with a list of sites that had recently linked to me. First to turn up was The Inn at the End of the World, a blog maintained by a saturnine bagpiping Tridentine Catholic in Califonia who shares my distaste for Coke-jingle hymns and Niceness. If you're reading this, John, give me an email. We odd-men-out ought to stick together. When one of my sons who understands HTML is available, I'll add your link. # ( 11:20 AM ) Elinor Dashwood Hmm.  You are Hate. You care little to nothing about people and things around you. You are consumed by feelings of animosity and loathing towards everything or one thing and it affects your view of all that is around you. What Emotion Are You? brought to you by Quizilla I'd have described it as intense exasperation with the crackheads, cowards, and happy-face halfwits who seem to constitute about 90% of the population, but no matter. These quizzes don't have the software to do really subtle and probing analysis, I suppose. # Saturday, August 02, 2003 ( 9:03 AM ) Elinor Dashwood It's my blog and I'll gripe if I want to, Snipe if I want to, Say "Tripe!" if I want to. Back in the early days of Mommentary I was blissfully unaware that anyone was reading it except Cacciaguida. I knew he was linking to me a lot, and now I rather wish he hadn't, because I'm slipping into the dreaded clutches of Niceness. This is very bad: I loathe Niceness. I think it must be akin to charm as described by Anthony Blanche in Brideshead, a deadly blight that freezes virtue and slays truth. By Niceness I don't mean charity, courtesy, tact, or any of the admirable virtues that keep the wheels of human society turning. I mean the suffocating pressure to avoid doing or saying anything that causes discomfort; a pressure men may feel, but one which bears down with particular force on women. It's Nice to forego saying the Rosary at a Catholic bible study if one of the members has brought an Evangelical neighbor along; it's Nice to go to a relative's uncanonical wedding and pretend it's real; it's Nice to behave toward homosexual pairs as if they were quite as respectable as married people. Above all, it's not Nice to say anything that embarrasses one's family. I'm not making this up: several times in the last eight months or so I've heard accounts, generally from the champion of the moment, of someone's defending me from the fallout of some pungent criticism I've made by telling the incensed target that I'm "really a very nice lady." These stories make me quite wild. I am not Nice! I hope I am charitable, truthful, honorable, and just, respectful to old people and mindful of my duty; but I've never been Nice and I don't propose to start now. As far as I can see I'll have to start a new blog that nobody knows about, and post my more stinging observations there. There's no point in blogging if you're going to be afraid of What People Will Think. # Friday, August 01, 2003 ( 10:06 PM ) Elinor Dashwood I can't agree with Eve about this column in the Austin Chronicle. Of course the demise of the literary and film hero, and his replacement by radioactive freaks who breathe fire and change the weather, has been a bad thing for American culture. The point about Philip Marlowe is that he doesn't have any superpowers; he isn't cleverer or stronger or even a much better shot than most of the people he comes in contact with. What Marlowe has over the crooks, grifters, and cowards on both sides of the law is an additional ounce of self-respect that enables him to resist the dehumanizing drift of the world. Others cooperate in the meanness and excuse themselves with shallow selfish platitudes - to get along, go along, don't make waves, and look out for Number One. What makes Philip Marlowe so noble is that all he gains from playing fair, from refusing to take dirty money or to let the innocent be blamed, is perpetual poverty, occasional beatings, and . . . himself. That's what was important about the old movie heroes, and what's so lame and uninteresting about these silly creatures who fell into vats of chemicals: the real hero has nothing but self-respect, a power available to us all, to fight off the degrading and soul-destroying enemies of cowardice, greed, and cruelty. The question posed to every film hero was "Will you take the easy way, will you strike a bargain with shabby self-interest, or will you stick doggedly to the right even if it seems it must crush you?" That is the real choice, every day, in every single person's own life, and the daily answer we give is the measure of our heroism. That's why the old films - Casablanca, Key Largo, On the Waterfront, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and many more - will speak to us long after the last CG explosion in the last puerile superhero flick is forgotten. # Thursday, July 31, 2003 ( 12:19 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Requiescat in pace, Bob Hope. Go here to read an article about the legendary entertainer's life and faith. One of the subtlest compliments that has been paid to this admirable actor, comedian, and patriot is that, in spite of having been English by birth, he was widely assumed to have been Irish. This was probably owing in part to his longtime involvement in Catholic projects, but I daresay the nose helped. # Monday, July 28, 2003 ( 9:35 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Thanks to the Rat for alerting us to the approach of the rubber duckie fleet. Readers on the eastern seaboard are urged to look out for the globe-floating squeakies as they make landfall this summer. # ( 9:24 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Cacciadelia has just learned to snap her fingers. My daughter the Beat. # Sunday, July 27, 2003 ( 4:14 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Months ago I made a promise not to grouse to our poor, overworked, and altogether meritorious pastor about things that annoy me during Mass. I mean to keep that promise; so I propose to gripe to you instead. Some time ago I alluded to my vigorous dislike of hymns in which the congregation assumes the role of our Lord, especially "I Am the Way" and "Here I Am, Lord". I have a new opprobrium which our organist has been playing every Sunday for a month, and it's called "Bread of Life". This isn't the already sufficiently objectionable "I am the bread of life/He who comes to me shall not hunger", etc. which can at least make out a case that the singer is only quoting our Lord's own words. Oh, dear me, no. This one is quite new to me, and runs thus: I myself am the Bread of Life/ You and I are the Bread of life/Taken and blessed, broken and shared/By Christ, that the world might live." I hate this song, which strikes me as sailing very near the wind in the matter of blasphemy. It makes me want to shake whichever crooning parishioner is handiest and demand, "Will you listen to what you're saying? Do you understand what you're suggesting?" (So far I haven't done so.) To the lyricist responsible for this abomination I have this to say: you're not the bread of life; don't try to implicate me in this dirty outburst of spiritual pride by saying that I am, either; what "you and I" are is poor stumbling sinners trying, and ever failing, to do our best, and so far from being fit nourishment for the souls of others, in constant and crying need of mercy and strengthening ourselves. And don't you forget it, bobo. # Saturday, July 26, 2003 ( 2:35 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Lord love a duck. Jesse Orosco, longtime Met, has been acquired by the - I don't generally like to use language like this, but needs must - the Yankees. I like Orosco, a member of Athletes For Life, and for long a reliable closer for the Mets. Cacciaguida used to call him Captain Coronary: Orosco would come on in the ninth inning of a tie game, load up the bases, and then strike out the next three batters in order. And I can't forget that, during the last game of the 1986 Series, he defied the craven evasions of the designated-hitter rule, and got a hit for the Mets. Well, everybody's got to eat . . . good luck to a good pitcher of astounding staying power (he's older than I am!), whatever company he's now keeping. # ( 1:52 PM ) Elinor Dashwood From correspondence with an old friend of ours, an observation of mine on the same-sex marriage debate: Homosexual activists say they want to be able to be married, and by that they intend the general public to infer that they mean quiet, faithful, workaday marriages like mine. In fact - and a lot of them were quite annoyed with Andrew Sullivan (or Ferguson? I can't keep them sorted out in my mind) for letting the cat out of the bag - what they really mean is married insurance rates and a big fancy party, and then cohabitation varied by occasional jaunts through the bars and bathhouses. Ugh. I can't spend a lot of time getting worked up about this issue. (Anyway, I've got Cacciaguida to do it for me, and if we both fretted about it, the whole family would be a wreck.) The legal status of matrimony has been whittled away to such a pitiful fragment that I wonder how much worse it would be if homosexuals were able to swan around calling themselves "married". I look forward with malign glee to the predictable problems that will suddenly arise when SSM becomes an option. Will mere cohabitors be taken less seriously by their friends and families than "married" pairs? What to do about the partner who can't commit? Do you invite your in-laws from your first "marriage" to the christening when you and your second "spouse" adopt? Who gets the silver when you divorce? I can't condone SSM, but if it comes to pass, there will certainly be some laughs in it for the ill-disposed traditionalist. # Friday, July 25, 2003 ( 6:31 PM ) Elinor Dashwood I can't believe I really saw this. Mattel does occasional Barbie doll special editions to tie in with a popular movie, personality, or, apparently, snack food. While I was rummaging around on eBay trying to score a Little Miss Revlon, I was staggered to see a listing which features a very pretty African-American doll with an Oreo cookie theme. Who was asleep at the switch when that project got the green light? # Wednesday, July 23, 2003 ( 1:04 PM ) Elinor Dashwood I've figured out why I like to make fashion doll clothes. It's the seamstress' natural desire to make really fabulous outfits, combined with my own absolute determination not to wear anything of the kind. I have a 20" Miss Revlon type doll and a 16" Eve, both modelled for quite high-heeled shoes, and I am much enjoying designing dresses for them. I must say they have the figure for them, which I certainly have not; picture the Willendorf Venus dressed by Lands End and you'll understand why I have not the least wish to wear anything with spandex, fur prints, or heels higher than an inch - and those only on special occasions. # Sunday, July 20, 2003 ( 2:24 PM ) Elinor Dashwood "In the end, it's not a matter of logic. In the end it's a matter of love." Two Sleepy on men and the Mets. I grew up about fifteen minutes from Shea, and my family watched all the games on television. (What the heck is a "dry beer", I always wondered? I figured it fell into that quintessential Sixties classification, Just-Add-Water.) I wasn't ever a red-hot fan, but we watched the 1969 Series in our parochial-school classrooms, and I had a terrible crush on Tom Seaver when I was eight or nine. (A few years later - and speaking of "A Man For All Seasons" - it was Nigel Davenport. I had offbeat tastes.) I was too busy in college to think much about baseball, but I'd have shown Cacciaguida the back of my hand if he'd been a Yankee fan. I was thinking about this during the 2000 Series, especially when That Knuckle-Walking Thug Roger Clemens appeared to be about to start a fistfight with my Mikey (Piazza, that is) after his bat broke. The result of my cogitations is this: for Yankee fans, it's a matter of results, while for Mets fans it's a matter of love. If you love the Mets, it's because they're yours, like brothers or sons: usually fun, often exasperating, occasionally triumphant, but always your own, whatever happens to them. And I still think Tom Seaver is a sweetie-pie. # |
|
||
