August 2010 Archives

Kat wonders to which religious orders the Houses of Hogwarts correspond: Hufflepuff = Benedictines; does Ravenclaw = Dominicans or Jesuits?

I've been blessed to have many people point out with interest, reviews of Eat Pray Love before I made the mistake of innocently watching the movie. I have tried to read the book as it sits next my bed and stopped and started and stopped. I could tell you what I find offensive, but so many people are doing much better job than I am, so I'll share.

First, via Dinka, we have Time Magazine's review. Dinka was also generous enough to quote the money phrase on her Facebook page:

His take on Liz's year abroad as a whole, in fact, might have been that beautiful white people enjoy listening rapturously to moral lectures and fortune-cookie affirmations delivered by the old, the unattractive or the darker-skinned.

Next, Barbara Nicolosi at Church of the Masses with Fawn Pander Blather:

At its core, Eat, Pray, Love relates the tedious pilgrimage of a selfish, immature narcissist (don't think of that as a redundancy as much as an emphasis) who manages to evade true spirituality (in the sense of sacrifice and repentance) true connection with other persons (in the sense of sacrifice and repentance) and plot points (in the sense of sacrifice, and well, repentance.... Note to self: There's a great new talk on the core of the successful transformational story arc there....).

The events of the past year (and I promise I will post an update, I just have yet to figure out how to find the words) have left me with negative 300 tolerance of the notion of ending marriages to "find yourself". It's an open wound for me. I'm pretty much outraged that modern culture finds this acceptable. I could write a million entries on what's wrong with this concept, but for now I'll just say I have a real problem with hit books and movies celebrating such selfishness.

The last is Eat, Pray, Love...why bother? I think this one spoke to me most of all:

For me, it was a morality tale of a different kind: a warning against spiritual smugness. As I watched EPL, I wondered to myself, “How could someone so hungry for answers spend four months in the cradle of Christianity and not encounter a single soul who could — lovingly yet with an appropriate sense of urgency — show her the truth path to God? She found language lessons — what about FAITH lessons?”

I didn't understand this at all, and it disturbed me. I saw it as a slap in the face of my Italian/Catholic culture, which sort of brings us back to the Time Magazine quote.

I suppose I'll try again to read the book. Julia Roberts annoys the heck out of me, so I'm almost 100% sure I'll skip the movie.

A review of Theodore Dalrymple's book on sentimentality:

In his new book, he argues that sentimentality is the virus that is eating away at modern life. It destroys the sense of responsibility; it undermines human relationships; and it has a close affinity with aggression and violence.

[It] lies, [Dalrymple] says, in the Romantic idea that feelings must be expressed, and that passions and desires are innocent – which means that they deserve instant gratification. Tact, consideration, self-control and fortitude are cast aside: they indicate 'repression’, which is bad for you. Good manners are thus reduced to an undesirable psychological condition. But the cult of feeling can have more dramatic consequences than that. As Dalrymple notes, the lynch-law of the media now dictates that anyone who fails to show sufficient feeling in public (the Queen after Diana’s death, Kate McCann after the disappearance of her daughter Madeleine) will be denounced and denigrated.

This is what makes sentimentality so much worse than a mere windy emotionalism: at its core is a special kind of self-righteousness. You do not just have a feeling, whatever it may be (caring passionately about 'kiddies’, for example, even if the children in question are completely unknown to you); you have a warm glow of superiority in expressing that feeling and hence a righteous hatred of those who do not show it too. 'There is’, Dalrymple observes, 'always something coercive or bullying about public displays of sentimentality.’

Saw this at Lifehacker: Make your own spice blends with what you have instead of paying for a can of Old Bay or pumpkin pie mix or whatever.

Spotted in a combox at Insight Scoop: (emphasis added by me)

"Only the other day I saw in an excellent weekly paper of Puritan tone this remark, that Christianity when stripped of its armour of dogma (as who should speak of a man stripped of his armour of bones), turned out to be nothing but the Quaker doctrine of the Inner Light. Now, if I were to say that Christianity came into the world specially to destroy the doctrine of the Inner Light, that would be an exaggeration. But it would be very much nearer to the truth. The last Stoics, like Marcus Aurelius, were exactly the people who did believe in the Inner Light. Their dignity, their weariness, their sad external care for others, their incurable internal care for themselves, were all due to the Inner Light, and existed only by that dismal illumination. Notice that Marcus Aurelius insists, as such introspective moralists always do, upon small things done or undone; it is because he has not hate or love enough to make a moral revolution. He gets up early in the morning, just as our own aristocrats living the Simple Life get up early in the morning; because such altruism is much easier than stopping the games of the amphitheatre or giving the English people back their land. Marcus Aurelius is the most intolerable of human types. He is an unselfish egoist. An unselfish egoist is a man who has pride without the excuse of passion. Of all conceivable forms of enlightenment the worst is what these people call the Inner Light. Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within. Any one who knows any body knows how it would work; any one who knows any one from the Higher Thought Centre knows how it does work. That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones. Let Jones worship the sun or moon, anything rather than the Inner Light; let Jones worship cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his street, but not the god within. Christianity came into the world firstly in order to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain. The only fun of being a Christian was that a man was not left alone with the Inner Light, but definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners." --G.K. Chesterton

Seven Quick Takes is being hosted at Betty Beguiles this week.

1. I love coffee. I love cake. I love coffee and cake. I love coffeecake. I love coffee and coffeecake even more when I'm enjoying it with friends. And doesn't coffee and cake taste even better when eaten off cute dishes?

2. I never used to give much thought to cocktails, but between my sister introducing me to Cosmopolitans and some radio show's putting daiquiris into my head, I've been having fun this summer exploring the world of the blender and the shaker.

3. Which puts me in mind of this treasure from the early days of St Blog's: Tom of Disputation's Assumption Swizzle. "...drink only for cheer, lest it lead you to sin, and drink only one, lest it lead you to dormition. "

4. Which makes me think of this fine piece of literature:

Seriously, this book is a scream. Maybe the Assumption Swizzle will make it into the next edition.

5. We have one of these living in the shrubs around our front door.

6. Port Harcourt, Rivers State, Nigeria, has over 1 million residents. Did you know that? I didn't, until this week.

7. I have so many quotations posted at Happy Catholic starred in my Google Reader. Here's a couple:

We should look for someone to eat and drink with before looking for something to eat and drink. -- Epicurious

The Magi set out because of a deep desire which prompted them to leave everything and begin a journey. It was as though they had always been waiting for that star. -- Pope Benedict XVI