Twelth Night

Perhaps appropriately given the occasion, I'd already had two cocktails by the time the camera came out. In any case, not a great photo on account of some shake:

That's Normandy Sole with some steamed red potatoes and Swiss chard.

You may be thinking you don't remember sole coming in mussel shells. It's quite a recipe. I made it this way.

• Make a rich fish broth. 
• Put the broth in a saucepan with thinly slices onions and shallots, a couple of lemon slices and some coarse sea salt and boil gently for a half hour. You need to end up with enough to poach some sole fillets in. Strain and pour into a pan wide enough to poach the fish.
• Then, not surprisingly, you poach the sole and put it and just enough of the juice to keep it from drying in a casserole in a just warm oven (170-190 F) to keep it hot. 
• Meanwhile make some moules mariniere. Once the mussels are open, put them in with the sole. Add the juice from the mussels to the poaching liquid. Begin gently reducing the combined liquids.
• Chop some mushrooms roughly and cook them in butter until they render their juices, Add those to the combined liquids. Continue cooking the mushrooms until ready and add some truffle if you have it. Set aside.
• At this point you have a choice about what else you are going to add. Last night I cooked some scallops and shrimp and added them. You can also add poached oysters, crayfish and breaded smelt. Anyway, fry them up, being careful not to overcook and add them to the sole and mussels.
• Now to finish the sauce. Mix some flour and butter until you have a paste and add it to the liquid stirring well while it thickens and the flour cooks a bit (you don't want a raw flour taste in your sauce). Then turn off the heat. Beat one or two egg yolks and then gently add some of the sauce while whisking all the time so the yolks don't cook. Once the temperature has been gently raised, add the yolk mixture to the sauce. 
• Add a dollop of cream and heat it gently until you're satisfied the eggs are cooked. You can use a thermometer if you are paranoid. I just heat it until it's about to boil, whisking all the time, then turn it off. Taste and season as required. Add some milk or cream if it is too thick.
• Add the mushrooms to the cream sauce and heat through and pour the sauce over the fishes and take it to the table.

I appreciate that those are vaguish directions but if you really want to learn to cook, you have to learn to trust your ability to get the right consistency and taste to a sauce.

And now to put away the Christmas decorations.

Everywhere else in the world they get to celebrate Epiphany today. Here in North America it's just another day. Shameful.

John's letters

My Brideshead Revisited blogging was Catholic culture everyday. Now that is over, Catholic culture will be less frequent but still here some days and today is one of those days. Of all the aspects of Catholic culture, one of the most interesting is moral theology.  Catholic moral theology is one of those things that people claim to hate but keep finding uses for. Anyway, here is bit of Catholic culture regarding moral theology and what better place to start talking about Catholic culture than an anecdote about an event that took place in the basement of an Anglican church.

A few years ago now, I was in a discussion group at an Anglican church. As the visiting Catholic, I tried to be a sympathetic listener rather than contribute a lot to the discussion. The discussion grew out of one of the Alpha courses so it was very much at the evangelical, or low church, end of the scale: much talk of scripture and preaching and very little ceremony, long flowing robes or romantic choral tradition.

Anyway, John's letters came up. This was not the wish of the group leader. She was a big fan of people reading the Bible, in theory anyway, but in practice she spoke almost exclusively of the letters of Paul. She cited bits of the gospels–especially Matthew and Luke—but didn't seem much interested in the larger context. The Old Testament for her was the selected bits from Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy and the prophets. The other stuff not so much. She knew the other stuff but she didn't base any interpretation on it.

Anyway, there was this very protestant woman in the group. She was a good person and always trying to be the servant of all. This woman had once visited a friend of mine and the friend left her alone for a moment and came back to find her cleaning the bathroom.

This one session, she was very nervous. She'd been reading John and she'd come across this:

If you see your brother or sister committing what is not a mortal sin, you will ask, and God will give life to such a one—to those whose sin is not mortal. There is sin that is mortal; I do not say that you should pray about that. All wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin that is not mortal. (First letter from John, Chapter 5, verses 16-17)

This poor woman was shaking as she read that out to us. She was shaking because whatever protestant tradition she'd been brought up in she had been taught that Catholic teaching about venial and mortal sin was unscriptural and a lie. It sounded, to her, like this passage contradicted what she had been taught.

John is like that in his letters; he suddenly throws out things that shake you up. He more or less has to because his style is to tear off about seemingly comforting notions about love and God with great enthusiasm and then he has to pull back and qualify and explain* because he realizes he has gone too far. It is one of the many things the letters have in common with the gospel that is attributed to John. He gushes a bit and then he gets going to the point he has to pull back.

His first letter starts off saying that everyone sins and that if we deny that we sin, we are liars. That sounds good but he ends up saying, "No one who abides in him sins; no one who sins has either seen him or known him." Those two statements simply cannot be true at the same time, so John has to make an adjustment about sins and categories of sin, as he does in the bit above. Everyone sins but some kinds of sin do not necessarily imply that we are separated from Jesus, that we do not abide in him.

Incidentally, I have never seen any Catholic moral theologian cite this passage to justify the distinction between venial and mortal sin. They always argue on straight logical grounds. In Catholic thinking the two types of sin is flow out of natural law. In a sense, of course, you might say that John arrives at his conclusion the same way, albeit with considerably less logical rigor. As Lady Marchmain might say, the distinction between the two types of sin is in the logic of the thing.

By the way, "venial" derives from a Latin word meaning forgiveness because these are forgivable sins. All sins are forgivable, of course, but some require full penance and absolution whereas venial sins are forgivable sins do not require that we make full penance or even that we be aware of a specific sin being a sin. Anyway, the point I ant to make is that "venial"  does not derive  from Venus referring to matters of sexual love. That said, it seems to me that many, many sexual sins, probably the vast majority of sexual sins, are necessarily venial. This quite contrary to what a lot of Catholics argue.

Which brings to mind a funny thing about Casanova, whom I love. Casanova requested and received the last rites on his deathbed. As a consequence, a lot of people, including not a few scholars, have written that Casanova had a last minute change of heart. But he didn't: Casanova was devout Catholic his entire life. Really.

It's one of the incredible ironies that when the first edition of Casanova appeared in France it was heavily censored not because of the sexual stuff but because of his pro-Catholic and pro ancien regime sentiments. People like Casanova, Walter Pater, and Evelyn Waugh always cause scandal for some kinds of thinkers precisely because they refuse to be as evil as their critics want them to be. TS Eliot, for example, despised Pater to such a degree that he couldn't write rationally about the man.

Okay, back to work with me. I'll be writing about male bashing in sex advice columns tomorrow.

*This is the opposite of Paul who starts off by saying things that shake us up but, if we read to the end, he ends up qualifying them down in ways that don't shake us up so much.

A pope quote

I was going to say another big writing day but that is the way it is going to be for the next little while so I won't. Saying I'll be busy writing has an apologetic tone about it and there is no point in apologizing for what is normal.

Here is the quote from The Light of the World that jumped out at me yesterday:

Less clearly but nevertheless unmistakably, we find here in the West, too, a revival of new Catholic initiatives that are not ordered by a structure or bureaucracy. The bureaucracy is spent and tired. These initiatives come from within, from the joy of young people. Christianity is perhaps acquiring another face and, also, another cultural form.

That is real reformer talk. This is a Pope who expects and welcomes change. He isn't trying to drive and control change. He talks about it coming from somewhere else. Benedict is an old man and he knows he is an old man.

I remember when I did my first will, I had an instruction that required multiple steps to deal with conditionals. There was a piece of property i wanted to go to a certain kind of person, so I had this complicated set of steps. My lawyer looked at me and said, 'You can't legislate from the grave.'

I'm sure he has said this line before. It had a practiced ring about it. But it is so true. There is point where you have to let go of the world and it comes long before death. A big part of living successfully is dying successfully. If, like a certain recently deceased politician, you find yourself fighting for some piece of legacy legislation on your deathbed, you have failed at life.

Reading Benedict, you can see a man who has begun the renunciation necessary to die successfully long ago. He is ready to let go.

But perhaps the most telling, and true, line in that quote above is about the bureaucracy. That is the line about the people who haven't begun to let go, the people determined to legislate from the grave. The big irony of every generation is that the young Turks grow up to be Bourgeois. Jacques Brel has a song about this. Baby Boomers, however, refuse to accept that they are old, tired bureaucrats. Even now, when the youngest boomers are entering their fifties, they imagine that youth is on their side; they imagine that they have a natural affinity with youth.

But the old rebellion is now just an entrenched bureaucracy and, like all bureaucracies, it only cares about self preservation.

I was thinking last night about a friend of mine who was once quite the young rebel. She was, and remains, an anti-poverty advocate. She is a ,member of every anti-poverty group in the community. She hectors and badgers people to give more and accuses business people of being rich and selfish.

A few years ago, the Ontario government passed a law that said that a list of all the public employees paid over a  certain threshold must be made public along with their salaries. And my friend made the top ten list for her city. All ten were in the top two percent of earners for that city. The thing that staggered people, though, was that the others were administrators. My friend, however, is an elementary school teacher.

That, of course, was why she had gotten away with accusing others of being rich all these years. No one imagined that an elementary school teacher could make so much. One teacher who is also a union rep I met a few years ago, told me that the salary in question was impossible, pure fiction, when I told her the story. But it's not fiction. It's a matter of public record.

My friend still goes about hectoring "the rich". I suspect people take her a lot less seriously now that her status was revealed on page one of the local paper. She still takes herself as seriously as ever.

And so do the old "reformers" of the 1962 generation in the church. They aren't though. They are just another self-preserving bureaucracy.

A big writing day

I am doing a lot of real work today and won't have that much time for blogging.

I have been meaning to link to a post on another blog for a while, however, and do so here for your entertainment. I have long been a supporter of the theory that the 1960s are relatively unimportant. I think the social changes that really mattered last century happened in the 1930s, 1950s and 1970s.

Anyway, there is this other blog where this guy has set forth what I think is  fairly perceptive account of what happened to male sexuality as a result of the 1970s. However, before the link two caveats. The site in question is not pornographic but the blogger in question is blunter and cruder than I tend to be. Second Caveat, the blogger at the end of the link is very political and, as regular readers will know, I am not.

That said, here is Stacy McCain explaining the rise of what porn fans call girl-on-girl action. (Did you ever notice, by the way, that hard core porn fans love to use the word "action" to describe well, "non-action": I mean it's just a guy operating his computer with one hand watching two girls faking it. After a while you begin to wonder whether porn fans like their sex the same way armchair athletes like sports.)

My one criticism is that McCain, as everyone doing this sort of stuff does, assumes that all the explaining needs to be done on the guy side of the equation. He is remarkably uncurious about how girls have changed and what drove them to change. To read this stuff, you would think that girls and women inevitably deliver whatever the guy culture wants. You'd never think girls are just as capable of driving the culture as guys.

There will be some Benedict Blogging tomorrow.

In which I reveal myself to be heartless

The Catholic blogosphere was heated up a while ago about some reality show following the lives of pregnant teens. One of these girls, having had one baby, got pregnant again and had an abortion. The take on the Catholic blogosphere was that the girl's erratic behaviour during the episode was a strong indication that having an abortion has hurt her.

Maybe. On the other hand, she may forget all about it and be just fine in two weeks. Short term emotions mean nothing. Think of the millions of people who've vowed to love no other, to never forget, to change their lives. What you feel "inside" is utterly insignificant; what matters is what your actions make you become. The parent who gets out of bed and takes care of their child at three in the morning, loves that child even if they feel deep resentment and anger "inside" every second they are up.

In any case, even if some women are terribly upset by having abortions, lots of others aren't.

The thing that jumped out at me, however, and doesn't seem to have upset others nearly so much, was this:

Having missed an appointment for an injection of the birth-control shot Depo Provera, Markai found herself pregnant for a second time.

That's not from some liberal but from a conservative Catholic named Kathryn Jean Lopez. What a casual way to describe a major moral failure. You can hate me for this if you want, but I read that and thought, "She missed her injection and she couldn't say no to sex until she had time to reschedule?! Seriously?!

I'm sorry, I cannot join Lopez in thinking this teenager a victim. She's weak to be certain but many of the most dangerous people are weak. Telling her she is a victim only makes her more dangerous to herself and others. Virtue is strength. The weak person can never be a good person.

Light of the World

A very kind person gave me the Pope's new book for Christmas. It's a great read so far (I'm on page 56).

A couple of thoughts. I've read a number of interviews praising Peter Seewald, the journalist who conducted the interviews that produced the book. That praise is misplaced. The book is good despite Seewald and not because of him. His questions are opinionated and the man is, for the most part, clueless. He has no understanding of the man he is interviewing and obviously either didn't listen to the answers he was getting or just isn't smart enough to adjust his interview questions to respond to answers he didn't expect.

During the chapter on Climate Change, for example. It rapidly becomes painfully obvious that Benedict just doesn't care about the issue. Seewald had a written list of questions, however, and he was going to read them out and get answers.

But I wonder if many people are listening all that carefully.

At one point, Seewald asks about the future of Catholicism in Europe and begins by citing statistics that establish that the overwhelming majority of people in some of these countries are Catholics. Seewald's point is that a small majority are pushing their secular viewpoint on others. Benedict is having none of this. Look at this bit from the beginning of Benedict's response:

... to what extent do these people still belong to the church in the first place?

Now there is an interesting question. A question, incidentally, that we don't ask nearly enough here in North America. For you can be baptized and confirmed and married in the church and not be a member in any meaningful sense. Heck, you can be all that and go to church most or all Sundays and still not really be a member.

And what is Benedict's diagnosis of the problem? The way he starts sounds very familiar; you think, I know where this is going:

On the one hand, they want to belong to her and do not want to lose this foundation. On the other hand, they are of course also shaped and formed interiorly by the modern way of thinking.

And you could finish that answer by yourself couldn't you? Feed that start to any traditionalist Catholic and they will tell you that the key thing is to reject modernity; that the church's role is to maintain tradition. Feed it to any liberal and they will tell you, "There he goes again trying to turn back the clock." That isn't where Benedict goes, however. To our surprise does quite the opposite (although the careful use of the modifier "interiorly" above might have warned us to expect more respect for the modern). The problem is not with the modern world:

Being a Christian must not become a sort of archaic stratum to which I cling somehow and on which I live to a certain extent alongside of modernity. Christianity is itself something living, something modern, which thoroughly shapes and forms all of my modernity—and in this sense actually embraces it.

Short version, abandon all hope ye who would see the Novus Ordo abandoned and the return of Mantillas and the culture that goes with that. It's not going to happen in this Pontificate (and if not in this Pontificate, then probably never).

I think it is increasingly clear that Benedict thinks the post Vatican 2 reforms were a failure. He is saying to the liberals, "Look, you blew it; your reforms failed." That part is clear.

What isn't so clear to many—even though Benedict says it over and over again for anyone with ears to hear—is that Benedict has no intention of abandoning Vatican 2. He wants a church that is modern but not modernist.

The English Romantic Catholic Tradition

I've been thinking about where to go with blogging next and, by coincidence, reading The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, which is pretty much the perfect thing to read if you are trying to put off thinking about more serious issues.

The Castle came along with Christmas. I was given an e-Reader (a wondrous thing) and it came with 100 books prepackaged. Many of these were selected for the very good reason that they are in the public domain, and thus The Castle of Otranto.

I'd never read it. I'd heard of it because it, along with Ann Radcliffe, was introduced as background in English literature courses I took a long time ago. None of my professors thought these things worth reading. The woman who taught me, who now lives up the street from me, dismissed Gothic literature as stuff for empty-headed 18th century girls. Another professor who taught me gave the impression that classic Gothic novels were just like the stuff you find the in Fantasy Literature section of bookstores today.

It was only last year that I read Ann Radcliffe for the first time and only this Christmas that I read The Castle of Otranto for the first time. It's great stuff.

There is not a lot of characterization in these novels. Some might argue that they are, therefore, not really novels but romances. That's fine with me. That they are very entertaining is all I'd claim.

Two things about them jump out at me. The first is the very heavy debt to Shakespeare. I know, I know, serious readers will say, "This is nothing like Shakespeare," meaning by that that it is not nearly as great. And that is fine but consider the famous comparison of classic French cooking and Big Macs. In classic French cooking it is not the meat that gives a dish its distinction so much as the sauce that goes with it and in a Big Mac ... I'm sure you can figure the rest out.

These writers also tell stories that feel like told stories just as Shakespeare does. It isn't hard to imagine how Shakespeare might have treated them.

This is armchair tourism literature. Like Shakespeare, neither Walpole nor Radcliffe had seen the foreign places they right about. Radcliffe obviously spent a certain amount of time with guidebooks creating background but background is all it is. All her scenes could take place on a stage with a painted background. Or you could leave the background out as Walpole does; the settings for Otranto are "a castle", "a monastery", "some caves" and various "private chambers" within the castle. And that is all there is. When reading this, you imagine people with wooden swords standing on a  stage acting out parts.

The other thing that jumps out at you when you read these stories is the Catholicism. It jumped out at first generation readers too. It is partly a real Catholicism but also partly an imagined one. In theory these writers, especially Radcliffe, are giving us a critique of Catholicism and the presentation is not intended to be charitable.

In one of history's many ironies, the effect was quite the opposite for many because the caricature of Catholicism that was presented, probably precisely because it was a caricature, proved to be liberating for many.

We do this all the time if you think about it. Cultural caricatures are often demeaning for the people who are, in theory anyway, targeted by the caricature. But often these caricatures are just as much, if not more, about wish-fulfillment fantasy for the people promoting them.

Modern soul and dance music as well as Japanese Anime cartoons, for example, trade in racial and sexual stereotypes that are often enthusiastically embraced by young black men and young Japanese women. Pay attention to both sets of stereotypes and you can see what young white women and men wish there partners were like.

You may say, but these things are an exaggerated cartoon and not real life at all! And you are right but that is precisely what makes it safe for those young women who listen soul singers exalt a very muscular, dominant forceful idea of male sexuality. But don't kid yourself, if the men in their own lives could be more like that they wouldn't say no. Likewise the image of womanhood you find, for example, in Anime is not one that most men would say no to; that is to say very feminine and even girly and dressed in a very neat, feminine and erotically elaborate fashion. Again, we have all been taught that we aren't allowed to ask for this sort of thing so we don't ask (most of us anyway). But if the gift were offered, it would not been turned down by many.

The Catholicism you find in English Romanticism beginning with the Gothic novels is often like that. It gives in to the sensually appealing aspects of Catholicism in a "safe" way.

As it turned out, not as safe as was imagined. Anyway, as the year starts off that is where my interest will be. It's something that has always fascinated me and a natural follow-up to Brideshead Revisited.