I am not asbestos! Sunday, August 17, 2003

Allergy attack. Sandbag eyes that won't quite sink. Catching up on other blogs and listening to Frankie.

Doesn't like crap games
With barons or earls
Won't go to Harlem
In ermine and pearls
Won't dish the dirt
With the rest of the girls...

Which then becomes

She'll have no crap games
With sharpies and frauds
And she won't go to Harlem
In Lincolns or Fords
And she won't dish the dirt
With the rest of the broads...

Earlier this evening my wife asked, reasonably, why I kept going to the church across the street if I disliked it so much. I think I've overstated how tedious it is, but my answer came out a little hollow: The presentation doesn't matter; what's important is the two thousand years underneath the floorboards. ("Tradition is the democracy of the dead"--G.K. Chesteron)

Yes, but. Why not find someplace that makes you feel the glory and come home happy? ("When I see the glory/I ain't gotta worry" --Tom Verlaine) Another pallid answer: Well, I do feel the glory, I just don't demonstrate it, necessarily.

Interesting fact: Walker Percy nudged me back, intellectually, anyhow, toward the Church; but his novels are at best ambivalent about actually attending Church. The priests are drunkards or radicals or hopeless; the Catholics are all bad ones. See Doctor Tom Moore, of Love in the Ruins, cited below. Waugh's the same way. He's never a booster for the Church; he presents faith matter-of-factly, when it appears at all. Frankly I think it's better in the satires, where it's implied instead of discussed outright. It overhangs the story and characters; they're in its shadow but they never realize it.

Meanwhile, Frankie's on the Road to Mandalay:

Ship me somewhere east of Suez
Where the best is like the worst
Where there ain't no Ten Commandments
And a cat can raise a thirst...

Rudyard Kipling's sister got that song, based on a famous poem of her brother's, banned throughout the Empire. I suspect he might've liked it.

@ 1:02:00 AM,

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