Author: simchajfisher

There’s a meme going around social media, and it’s making my eye twitch. Well-meaning but careless readers believe that, as the meme implies, it’s an excerpt from C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters. Here’s the quote:

[img attachment=”123046″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”screen-shot-2016-10-12-at-12-31-09-pm” /]

It’s fine, as far as it goes, but it’s certainly not from Screwtape, and it’s certainly gets nowhere near the level of wit, insight, or clout that C. S. Lewis could turn out with his left pinky finger. (And Uncle Screwtape would never say, “Keep up the good work!”)

Screwtape did have something to say about politics, but it’s more subtle and less meme-able. Here’s a passage from the actual book (“we” refers to the demons who tempt humans, and “the Enemy” is God):

About the general connection between Christianity and politics, our position is more delicate.

Certainly we do not want men to allow their Christianity to flow over into their political life, for the establishment of anything like a really just society would be a major disaster.

On the other hand, we do want, and want very much, to make men treat Christianity as a means; preferably, of course, as a means to their own advancement, but, failing that, as a means to anything—even to social justice.

The thing to do is to get a man at first to value social justice as a thing which the Enemy demands, and then work him on to the stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce social justice. For the Enemy will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of Heaven as a short cut to the nearest chemist’s shop. Fortunately it is quite easy to coax humans round this little corner.

Memes are designed to make you think, “Hey, YEAH! I’m RIGHT! I’ll go tell everyone.” And Screwtape’s advice is designed to make you think, ‘Oh, crap. I’m wrong. I’ll go to confession.”

Another way to tell the difference between real and fake quotes, besides the dubious content? The style and vocabulary. Remember several years ago, when everyone was drooling over this putatively prescient quote from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar:

“Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind is closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar.”

And I’m a Chinese jet pilot.

This sounds like Shakespeare in the same way that my dog smells like camelias, which is to say, not at all. Not said by Caesar, not written by Shakespeare, not quoted by anyone who has even a nodding familiarity with how the English language is supposed to work.

As Mother Teresa once said, “Wherever I go in the whole world, the thing that makes me the saddest is watching people pass along bogus quotes without even stopping to think if the attribution is plausible.” Or was it Abraham Lincolnmeme who said that? Aw, who cares. I’ll just pass it along.

Anyway. Here’s another quote that really is from Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, and which really can inform us as we defend and endorse our presidential candidates — and it’s short enough to fit inside a meme:

“To get the man’s soul and give him nothing in return—that is what really gladdens our Father’s heart.”

I believe not only that C.S. Lewis wrote that, but that a demon would actually think it. And you can pass that along, too.

***

Image: “The Laughing Demon” Katsushika Hokusai (葛飾北斎) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

I’m pleased to announce the lucky winner of a sterling silver hand-cast replica of Joan of Arc’s First Communion ring, courtesy of Door Number 9 on Peter’s Square! The winner is . . .

Kate Davis, who entered the giveaway by tweeting a message on Saturday, Oct. 8 at 4:19 PM.

I’ve emailed the winner using the address provided to Rafflecopter. Thanks to everyone who entered, and thanks to Door Number 9 for sponsoring this prize!

You can still pre-order this lovely ring from Elisa Low’s shop — the sooner the better, as they are made to order. Also check out Door Number 9 on Etsy for a wide array of handmade goods, quirky, Geeky, Catholic, and more.

On this date in 1944, the tiny Himalayan country of Tuva, populated mainly by Buddhist nomads, voted to become part of the USSR, and it is now a republic within the Russian Federation.

In Tuva, Stalin did his best to quash indigenous cultural practices, but traditional throat singing has endured and even flourished in recent decades. It used to be practiced only by men, but women are now learning the craft.

And a weird craft it is. Tuvan throat singers produce two sounds at once: a deep, deep, buzzing drone and, simultaneously, a higher-pitched overlay, often birdlike or locust-like in tone. In this example, the fellow on the right sets up the verse, and then the second voice joins in with two more tones coming from the same throat:

It’s music meant to carry in wide-open spaces, over lonely, isolated, wind-swept plains between high mountains. The sounds not only literally resonate in the topography of that world, they also echo the actual voices of nature: the unimpeded wind, the birds, streams, the crowds of insects, and perhaps the thundering hooves of yaks and the much-admired Tuvan horses.

It’s such a different kind of singing, and it calls for such a different kind of listening, I can’t get enough of it.  A blogger for Carnegie Hall notes:

a respected Tuvan musician [demonstrated] the igil, a bowed instrument with two strings tuned a fifth apart. When asked to play each string separately, he refused, saying it wouldn’t make any sense. The only meaningful sound was the combination of the two pitches played together.

Here’s one throat singer who is having a wonderful time being awesome, exotic nomad dude for a more global audience:

And here’s an extraordinary concert (the video is over an hour long) by a group of guys who open by making a sound you will never forget:

That’s my soundtrack for today. Astonishing. What are they singing about? I wish I knew! Many of the songs, I gather, are about horses and women and how excellent they are.

I wish I could make two sounds at once. I wish I could produce something and feel so placid as they seem to feel while doing it. Most of all, I wish I were better at listening to the whole of something, rather than picking out little threads and trying to make definitive sense of them in a linear fashion. It’s not as important as I think.

Looking for a tight, brisk adventure movie with some moral heft? We re-watched The Edge (1997, screenplay by David Mamet), and it was even better than I remembered. I can’t think why it’s not better known.

Anthony Hopkins plays Charlie Morse, a quiet, aging billionaire with a freakish knack for collecting theoretical knowledge. He and his supermodel wife (Elle Macpherson) are visiting the wilds of Alaska for a photo shoot. He loves her, but abruptly realizes that she’s carrying on with her photographer, the dissipated and cynical Bob (Alec Baldwin). Just as abruptly, he realizes that Bob plans to kill him for his wife and money — and Bob knows that he knows. As Charlie says in another context, “I seem to retain all these facts, but putting them to any useful purpose is another matter.”

As soon as this information comes to light, their tiny airplane crashes in the even wilder wilderness, and they are thrust together as enemies who need each other to survive. And then, a bear turns up, and it really wants to eat them. All of this happens within the first few minutes of the movie, and I haven’t given away any plot twists yet.

But I will be, starting now! Even if you know what’s going to happen, it’s a tense, thrilling, satisfying show. This trailer gives it a pretty fair shake:

Here’s what I saw:

Bob is thoroughly useless out of his element (he says that normally, his adventures consist of things like [lisping], “Oh, that cab driver was so rude!”). Baldwin as Bob brilliantly mixes a witty, virile, and nakedly carnal nature with little flashes of rage, resentment, and misery, revealing a gifted man who has squandered his life by giving into every one of his desires.

All Bob knows is what he wants out of people, and all Charlie knows is what people want out of him (even the grizzled outdoorsman wants to pitch a real estate development project to him). They are both lost, long before the plane crashes.

As Charlie says, “Just because you’re lost doesn’t mean your compass is broken.” But what kind of compass will they use to guide them? They are steered wrong by the almost irritatingly clever makeshift compass that Charlie fashions from a paper clip early on, before the men’s relationship is clear; but the second compass, made from the hand of the watch (a gift from the faithless wife), does work, and it shows them the way. In the form of the watch hand, the deceit of Bob and the wife becomes a guide. The wife is sort of an inverted Penelope: it’s her faithlessness (personified in Bob) that gives Charlie drive and direction, keeps him going, and brings both men home, one way or the other.

Also note that the wife’s gift to her lover is a watch that tells dual time, openly signifying duplicity and a refusal to commit. The inscription “For all the nights” tells us where Bob chooses to dwell: in the dark. Like the bear in the deadfall, his own weight and power works against him.

The movie keeps telling us that people in the wilderness “die from shame,” and this idea is the key to Bob’s salvation. The first time he almost dies, in the deadfall, he is still unchanged. He now has some regard for Charlie, but none for himself. At this point, despite being so near to death, he still thinks it’s all about getting the money and the girl, and he imagines his life is lost simply because he hasn’t won those things.

It’s not until the very end, when salvation is actually in sight (in the form of the helicopter) that he tells Charlie he’s sorry for what he’s done. He dies of shame — but it is shame, appropriate shame, that saves him. Without it, his life would have ended in the self-imposed deadfall of greed and ego; but shame brought him to repentance, which saves his soul, if not his bodily life.

The script is peppered with lines that make perfect sense as natural conversation and which also turn out to have some existential weight. When Bob shouts, “You would have died out there without me!” it’s just his ego lashing out — but it’s also true; and it’s true when Charlie tells the reporters, “They died saving my life.” It took two of them to kill the bear; but more broadly, it took two of them to save each other from their meaningless, directionless lives.

Great acting, great casting (but for a hilarious essay on the background of how this movie was put together, read this piece in Vanity Fair from producer Art Linson), swoon-worthy setting. Viewer caution: there is some cursing and a few scenes with blood and gore. None of it is gratuitous, but it’s pretty intense, sometimes terrifying. My 11-year-old son got the adventure part; my 13-year-old son also caught on to the battle of souls.

I hope I haven’t beaten to death these themes of being lost and being found, having direction and having a reason to live. The great part of this deft, brisk movie is that you can totally ignore all of the above, and just watch it because it’s tense and exciting and has a really scary bear in it. Recommended!

***
A version of this review was  originally published in the National Catholic Register in 2015.

[img attachment=”98244″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”whats for supper aleteia” /]

Hoop de doo! We survived another week. Here’s what we had:

SATURDAY
Pizza Hut Pizza and Ambitious Birthday Cake

Birthday party! Mr. Husband took the birthday girl and guests and some kids to the Worcester Art Museum, and I stayed home to shop, clean, decorate, and make an odd cake.

I had this black sugar paper that I bought but forgot to use for the last birthday cake, which actually turned out kind of awesome. It was months ago, but I’m going to share it anyway:

[img attachment=”122315″ size=”medium” alt=”irritable tiger cake has had about enough of you young person’s noise” caption=”irritable tiger cake has had about enough of you young person’s noise” align=”aligncenter”]

My daughter, who turned 16, thought a pretty silhouette of the letter “C” for her name might be pretty.

And it might’ve. This is one of those classic “if only you could see how it looked in my head” projects.

[img attachment=”122317″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”cake-and-design” /]

More earthy than ethereal. The sugar sheet was not terrible to use, but definitely not easy; although this was a pretty fiddly design for a first attempt. It was easy to cut, but more delicate than I expected, and I had to patch it together where it fell apart from overhandling. The package suggested spritzing the final result with water from a spray bottle to soften up the edges a bit once it’s on the cake. The only spray bottles we have are full of ammonia, and it wasn’t that kind of party.

The upshot: I’d use sugar sheets again if I especially wanted a straight edge on a design; and I’d try it again for a silhouette, but only with sharper scissors and more time than I had for this cake. Paper punchers would work well with this stuff. It comes in all kinds of snazzy colors and designs, too. The taste? A lot closer to paper than sugar.

Also, someone either bit or clawed or otherwise caused the one end of the cake to disappear from the platter while it was cooling. Also, Corrie dragged some egg shells out of the garbage and threw them in the batter while I was still stirring it up. And I ran out of frosting and couldn’t make more because I was out of confectioner’s sugar, and had already gone to the Quik-e-Mart once and spent half a week’s wages on a pound of butter, and I was saving the other half of my wages for beer. I thought maybe I could give the cake a sort of shabby chic floofiness by floofing up the frosting with a butter knife and then sprinkling candy pearls on it.

Anyway, the little girls were impressed!

[img attachment=”122321″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”cake-girls” /]

***
SUNDAY
Hamburgers and chips

Aldi sells 80/20 ground beef for $2.99, but it only comes in five-pound packages. I used to take out three pounds for burgers and freeze the rest for other meals, but somewhere along the line, we transitioned to just making enormous hamburgers.

[img attachment=”122322″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”big-burger” /]
No complaints.

***

MONDAY
Sausage subs with onions and mushrooms; sweet peppers and hummus

[img attachment=”122323″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”sausage-sub” /]

Ain’t it purty? Good eats.

***

TUESDAY
Pulled pork; candied yams

Hey, does anyone else have trouble shredding pork? I feel like it ought to just fall apart with a touch of the fork, but no matter what cut of pork I use and no matter how slowly and gently I cook it, I really have to work hard with forks and knives to give it that nice stringiness. What am I doing wrong? It tastes great, but it’s such a hassle.

The candied yams were straight from can to bowl to microwave to table. Mondays are the pits.

***

WEDNESDAY
HAM NITE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

They gave me so many compliments on my ham, I started to get kind of mad. I mean,  is an old family recipe, the way I cut off the plastic, put it on a pan, and turn the oven on, but still.

[img attachment=”122326″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”ham-night” /]

We also had mashed potatoes and frozen peas, as you see. I included this picture because I think the fork is funny. There’s life in the old dame yet!

Oh, and here is another ham picture worth sharing.

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The dog is thinking, “Lady, just because you paid me a nickel to bust up your chifforobe, doesn’t give you the right to call me ridiculous.”

***

THURSDAY
Seafood bisque; garlic knots

I made up a recipe using only things you can get at Aldi. I hope there is a contest or something.

I cooked some frozen salmon in the microwave (4 of the five wrapped filets that come in a bag), simmered a box of pre-sauced mussels on the stovetop, and shredded up a package of imitation crab meat.

FRIDAY

I believe some other daughter requested tuna noodle casserole, which means she can make it and I can have LEFTOVER BISQUE because I sure made a lot of it.

What’s for supper at your house? Anything good? Anything you made up? Oh, and tell me all about your favorite Italian food. I gots plans.

Today is the birthday of “Le Corbusier” (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris), the fascist architect and urban planner born in 1887, who’s responsible for so many of those barren, faceless, concrete boxes that litter our cities in lieu of buildings and homes designed with human beings in mind.

Here’s a typical Le Corbusier building:

[img attachment=”122249″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”villasavoye” /]

One of his favorite tricks was to hoist the whole thing up on skeletal pylons so it looks like an ocean liner in dry dock. His idea of urban planning was similar: you could create a rigorously tidy little world by stacking up poor people in oversized filing cabinets in the sky. Give them a little ribbon of grass to keep them occupied, and you’ll achieve a mathematically-pleasing societal utopia.

Here’s one of his Unité d’Habitations:

[img attachment=”122252″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”unite-dhabitation-berlin” /]

Never mind that people don’t want to live in boxes, and would also routinely violate his ideals of purity and simplicity by doing bourgeois things like going to work and school and shops and museums, and not especially wanting to be quarantined in a sterile skyscraper that hovers over a dim, vacant void on the outskirts of town.

Le Corbusier frowned mightily on anything that smelled of comfort or pleasant decoration, or even of humanity — things like cornices, pillars, arches, towers, gables, or even a little bit of paint. All of that is so bourgeois, so inefficient, so embarrassing. Much better to purify the world — and the human body. (He did for living room furniture what he did for city streets. His comfy chairs are a three-sided fence of slender steel with a cube of leather trapped inside.)

I really can’t figure out how pleased I am to announce that American architecture seems to have worked its way completely through and past his malevolent influence, and that we are now squirming unhappily on a pin at the opposite end of the exhibit marked “Modern Architecture: A Tragedy.” Behold: the completely other kind of horrible mistake you can make when designing a building:

[img attachment=”122257″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”suburban_tract_house” /]

If Le Corbusier wanted everything to be barren, severe, and reduced to sheerest mathematics, current architectural appetites demand an incoherent smorgasbord of AHVERYTHING.

The problem with McMansions is not merely that they are too big and ostentatious. We can live with that (although I wouldn’t want to heat that). The problem is that they don’t make any damn sense. If Le Corbousier’s buildings were unlivable because they were all rules and no humanity, McMansions flip a bird to all the rules in favor of whatever happens to catch the designer’s fancy — and it’s always something fancy. Nothing but cornices, pillars, arches, towers, and gables, all plastered with obscenely senseless stucco and tarted up with phony muntins.

[img attachment=”122259″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”mansion-2″ /]

For an excellent (and not really terribly snotty) explanation of just what it is that feel so “off” about these frankenhouses, see this excellent article McMansions 101: What Makes a McMansion Bad Architecture?

It is not, as so many will protest, merely a matter of taste. Taste is subjective, but there are some objective principles that must be followed if the eye and the brain are to find any peace with a living space. A good many buildings are not to my taste, but I can still acknowledge that they are designed well. This is a different situation entirely from a house with is not so much designed as vomited onto the blueprint with a fervent disregard for coherence that would make a Mad Lib weep with envy.

The author takes us through some basic principles of residential architecture: the principles of masses and voids, balance, proportion, and rhythm. (It’s worth noting that many of the other articles on this site are profane and snotty, but this one is mainly informative and enlightening, very worth a read.)

Le Corbusier despised and disregarded the basic human need for comfort and beauty; McMansions let us gorge on our basest decorative fancies, and we end up in a fever dream of faux luxury. Neither extreme satisfies the basic human need for buildings that both function and please. It’s almost as if human beings have a head and a heart, and will only live at peace when our homes do, too.

***

(For more reading about the origins of modern architecture, give yourself a treat and read Tom Wolfe’s immensely entertaining From Bauhaus to Our House. I’d love to hear what he has to say about McMansions and what they tell us about the American Soul. Not that anyone’s hiding anything.)

***

Image credits in order of appearance:

Villa Savoye By Valueyou, CC BY-SA 3.0

Unite d’Habitation Berlin by Marcus via Flickr (Creative Commons)

McMansion image By BrendelSignature at the English language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0,

McMansion 2 photo by FunnyBiz via Flickr https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

I’m not asking for advice.  I’m not asking for advice. I’m not asking for advice. I’m not asking for advice. I’m not asking for advice. I’m not asking for advice. I’m not asking for advice. I’m not asking for advice. I’m not asking for advice. I’m not asking for advice. I’m not asking for advice. I’m not asking for advice. I’m not asking for advice. I’m not asking for advice. I’m not asking for advice. I’m not asking for advice.

That being said, I’ve been exercising regularly and significantly altering my diet for almost two months now, and guess what? I gained weight. To me, this is a very clear signal from the adipose gods that I am meant to be an acolyte for life.

Also, I am still breastfeeding Corrie (19 months), mainly because she calls it “ding.” She toddles up to me and says, “H’lo, Mama. Gotta ding, Mama.” And I am not made of stone. I am, as I’ve previously mentioned, made of lard, and thus can put up very little resistance to this kind of thing. Some women will say, “Oh, my nursing baby is so hungry, the weight just slid right off!” Well, now we know to whom it slud. My theory is that my body recognizes that there will be a significant draw on available nutritive resources for the foreseeable future, and responds by hanging on extra tight to that sixty-pound reserve, just in case.

It’s really not so terrible being fat. You are excused from entire categories of clothing. Other women, on what ought to be a carefree jaunt to the beach, are burdened with wondering, “Is it going to be an occasion of sin to other people if I wear this bikini? What about a tankini, or a monokini, or maybe I should take a crack at this Slaves of the Immaculate Bosom of St. Wurgtrude-Approved Ultramagnifikini with Turtleneck and Detachable Dickey, just in case? What if there will be seminarians present? What if they are blind seminarians, but they have a very good imagination? Should I pack overalls, so they can hear them going ‘veep-veep-veep’ when I walk?”

But for a fat person, it’s simple. The only consideration is, “Do I have a flood insurance rider to cover the vacation homes whose hardwood floors I will ruin when my thighs displace half the lake?” Easy peasy, considerably more squeezy.

Meanwhile, regular exercise gives me all kinds of benefits. I no longer have to shout for help in getting off the couch when I’m tired of watching Netflix. I can put my feet up on the ottoman without sweating. The other day, I picked a waffle up off the floor without even making a plan for how I was going to become upright again. And best of all, I now have knee gap.

In conclusion, I would like clarify that, yes, I am still ballooning.

And now let’s put things right.

That seems to be my daughter’s goal with every game she plays. Everything needs to end up right where it belongs: baby cheetah with mama cheetah, dragon husband with dragon wife, all back in bed together where they belong. Barbie needs Ken, and Ken must have his mate, that no four-year-old can deny.

We drove past the ravished corn fields with their crowds of Canada geese, busily taking what they needed from between the rows. I half-turned my head to the back seat, where my little girl was gazing out the window, and I said, “Those are geese. See all their long, black necks? They are eating the corn that is left on the ground, and then they will fly up together and go somewhere warmer to live for the winter.” It was as it should be. The geese knew where to go. She nodded her little corn-golden head, taking the information in and filing it away where it needed to go.

What an immense delight to pour out knowledge into the ear a willing child. It’s one of the few times you can think, “This is exactly what I need to be doing. I did it right. She wanted to know, and I told her.” Key in lock. Fill up the glass. A purely satisfying moment.

It’s not childishness that makes us delight in putting things to rights, in bringing them home where they belong. Even in the midst of turmoil, we find a primal if fleeting satisfaction in finishing a task, turning chaos into order, making a jumble come out even. The most “adult” of activities is terribly, terribly basic in this regard. It’s stunningly simple: This is made to go inside that. Ever ask yourself, “But why does it somehow seem good, true, or beautiful to fit one thing inside another? What does that even mean?”

It means that, for once, things are where they belong. And that’s not nothing. It’s actually everything. It’s what we’re made to long for. It’s what we were made to do.

For many years, I was hung up on the idea that Heaven would be boring. The only interesting things I’d ever encountered were wobbly, wounded, fascinatingly warped. It was hard enough to conceive of any state of being for eternity, but maddening to imagine that it would be a dull state of being. I thought, with my untidy brain, that perfection meant utter tidiness.

It’s the old Ned Flanders heresy: that the Lord God of Hosts took on flesh in a blaze of glory, shook Jerusalem to its foundations with his words, was torn apart by whips and nails and bled dry; that he harrowed the deadlands and then in the morning came shooting out of the grave like a geyser of light, upending the armies of Hell with a flick of His resurrected finger, striding forth to establish the Church and then to ascend with unspeakable joy to the right hand of his Father, and now He calls upon us, His children, saying “BE YE . . .

. . . tidy.” With a tucked-in shirt and a clean part in our hair. You know, perfect.

Nah. He wants us to be perfect, but perfect means complete. Perfect means that everything is where it is supposed to be — not with mere tidiness, like a paperclip in a paperclip holder, but back where it was created to belong, like a lost child coming home, like the fulfillment of a lifelong promise, like the flesh of two made one. That kind of completion.

If that sounds boring to you, then you’re doing it wrong.

What we catch now, in rare moments of respite, is a reminder of who we are and for what we were made. A reminder, as we drive by the ravished fields, that we can glean what’s left between the rows of corn, but it’s only a stop along the way. We were made to go home. Find out what you were made to do, and go home.

****

Image: Jose Chomali via Unsplash

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Elisa Low is a costume designer, seamstress, purveyor of geeky accessories, and leading authority on all things Geek Orthodox. She also sells her own quirky goods at her Etsy Store, Door Number 9, and has a shop at the relatively new Catholic goods marketplace, Peter’s Square.

You refer to holy cards as a kind of “Catholic fan art.” Can you explain?

Today, there are all different versions of, say, superheros, in all different costumes: the dark and gritty version, the shiny reboot. Then there’s the humanized My Little Ponies, and there’s mashups, with heroes finding themselves in unusual situations.