G as in Good H as in Happy

Rector Abernathy's Good Wine

A Boxing Day-suitable story from the Washington Post, a charming anglophilic episode: 135-year old St. Mark's Episcopal Church on Capitol Hill now brews its own Winged Lion Lager and has seen an influx of twenty- and thirty-somethings on Sunday mornings.

Ever since reading J.F. Powys' (1875-1953) Mr. Weston's Good Wine while wandering through the English countryside, my idea of a great and good place has something to do with sturdy pub lunches and shelter resembling antique architecture.

John Gray, professor of European thought at the London School of Economics, describes the simply-evoked otherworldliness of that novel.

If there are literary influences at work in T. F. Powys, they come...from Nietzsche and Bunyan. In Mr. Weston's Good Wine he uses Christian imagery and biblical language to present a darkly pagan view of life. The book begins with a wine salesman arriving in an old Ford in the village of Folly Down. He is no ordinary wine salesman...and the wine he sells is no ordinary wine. He is...none other than God...come into the world to sell the light wine of love and the strong wine of death. Writing with exquisite economy, Powys recounts Weston's stay in Folly Down....

The greatest value of his work is in showing that it is still possible to write about the primordial human experiences to which religion is a response. Secular writers tend to ... end up stuck in the shallows of politics or fashion. On the other hand, Christian writers are mostly precious and unpersuasive...Very few 20th-century authors have the knack of writing convincingly of first and last things. A religious writer without any vestige of belief, Theodore Powys is one of them.

The feel of the book is somberly seductive, and we at Good&Happy, remembering the literal enchanted condition of immersion in it, neither recommend nor intend to re-read it.  Atavistic, near-pre-Celtic, Powys bewitches by the mossy tincture of those trace-origins it is likely we are invited as a species to outgrow. The book invokes a kind of spiritual dinosaur's footprint, exposing damp fissures in the foundation  on which civilization builds. Darkly, richly, intimately familiar beneath almost childlike diction.

Powys himself had an attenuated connection to customary life.  A member of a well-connected literary family, he retired at 29 to write in the almost forgotten village of Chaldon Herring. Chaldon -- with its village pub, The Sailors Rest, which houses a pre-Reformation altar stone -- is Folly Down in the novel.

Initial link via Titusonenine.

Christmas and The Teddy Bear

December 25, 2004

We've resisted for more than a week. Finally posting this is a Christmas gift to ourselves, this story about the widening ripples and accellerating power of love, care, true charity.

Via The Paragraph Farmer, and others.

Merry Christmas.

The Gift to be Simple, Eventually, After Pretense and Confusion

From Cover Story, by George Sim Johnston
December 10, 2004; Page W17, The Wall Street Journal

As for the Magi, who arrive on the scene a few days late: I rather like the prayer that Evelyn Waugh writes about them for the heroine of his novel "Helena":

You are my especial patrons, and patrons of all late-comers, of all who have a tedious journey to make to the truth, of all who are confused with knowledge and speculation... For his sake who did not reject your curious gifts, pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the Throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.

May we not include among the learned and oblique a few biblical scholars?

And ourselves?

A Blessed Holiday, everyone!

Common Inheritance

December 24, 2004

A music teacher at a children's conservatory in the NYC area (Westchester) reports

I had the opportunity to discuss, with some veteran teachers, what we have all perceived just over the last few years: the complete absence in young children of any familiarity with the great Christmas song literature, maybe the last repository of (natural voice) amateur singing left in this country outside of the Church.

"The only tunes that got consistent recognition from my 5-to-9 year old charges were 'Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer' and 'Jingle Bells'.

"Occasional recognition, by churchgoing or very well-rounded kids:
'O Christmas Tree', 'Deck the Halls', 'Silent Night', 'We Wish You a Merry Christmas', 'Joy to the World', '12 Days of Christmas'. Little knowledge of the words.

"Songs NONE of my 60 or so students recognized:

'Hark the Herald Angels Sing', 'Here We Come A-Wassailing', 'Angels We Have Heard on High', 'We Three Kings of Orient Are', 'O Holy Night', 'Good King Wenceslas', 'It Came Upon a Midnight Clear', 'Adeste Fideles'/'O Come All Ye Faithful', 'White Christmas', 'Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire'...

"In the past, music teachers would sometimes even go to these songs in the middle of the year, if in need of melodic examples, to make a point, since they were so universal. As far as I can tell, this body of common knowledge has been obliterated."

Via The Corner.

Let us hope it is not entirely so, that there is a parallel stream of music geeks coming alongside.  These are beautiful melodies, Mendelssohn, Handel, antique Latin and English airs.  And the shared imagery has until now passed under the partisan radar as one expression of the common human drive to "regain...the life, the inner Man," the faithful expectation of a Good Resolution to the shared condition of our species.

Red Zones

Hard and incommunicably rewarding callings.  I know a few who have followed them, who were praised as brave but from inside simply had no choice. Do I jump, or am I pushed?  Go, or, as Steven Vincent says, "regret my timidity for the rest of my life."

[Q} Where did you begin?
[A] By promising my wife that I would be careful. After that, everything was easy.

An interview with the art journalist who has turned his attention, his courage, his candor, his creativity, his "moral fervor"  to writing about Iraq in In the Red Zone: Iraq As You've Never Read About It Before.  Fact and feeling, rhetoric and reality, shimmering in the mind.

To be in a place like Baghdad — or perhaps any storied place — is to experience the microcosmic and macrocosmic of life simultaneously. By that I mean every detail, even the smallest, is fascinating — the architecture, the way people look and talk, the taxi cabs and heat, trying to speak Arabic and learn what to order on the menu. Then there is the overwhelming sense of the past and present. I remember walking at twilight down a busy shopping street just as the lights switched on and a muezzin began calling from a mosque. Right at that moment, two American Humvees rumbled past, each with a soldier standing and surveying the scene. They passed a grove of palms, and the mixture of the light, the crowds, the muezzin’s call and the military vehicles transfixed me. This is significant, something told me. For good or ill, this is history.

Later came more profound experiences of life and death and a sense of how deep tragedy and spirituality can carry the emotions and the imagination. These were personal feelings, aspects of myself I struggled to come to terms with. I didn’t dwell on them too much in my book, because I wanted In the Red Zone to be mostly about Iraq and the Iraqis.

Go.  Read. A link from Amy Ridenour. She promised it wouldn't disappoint. It didn't.

All-American snack* haiku

December 23, 2004

*Popcorn is one of America's truly native foods. The oldest ear of popcorn, discovered some 55 years ago in a bat cave in New Mexico, is thought to be around 4,000 years old. Popcorn was an important food of the Aztec Indians. It was also an integral part of their ceremonies, often used to decorate ceremonial headdresses, necklaces and statues of their gods, including Tlaloc, the god of rain and fertility.

Sideways-back into his original koan-a-day practice, Richard stalks a modern Buddhist-graveyard moment. Sweet the uses of adversity, the stench of failure and frustration, hopeless messy loss: a brand-new launching pad that is a cheerful and quiet heart.

In retrospect, it was inevitable that he would capitulate.

Busy chasing Bliss,
silly child requires a treat.
Smells like dharma here.

def: sil·ly (sl) ... Lacking seriousness or responsibleness; frivolous...  [Middle English seli, silli, blessed, innocent, hapless, from Old English gesaelig, blessed.]

Building Blocks for Bistro Bliss

December 22, 2004

An interview with Thomas Keller, precise, uncompromising master of the Per Se Kitchen, whose favorite meal is "the perfect Bibb lettuce salad, a great roasted chicken, and a lemon tart."

Rapid, challenging simplicity. The terrain of Czikszentmihalyi's flow.

Around here, we aim for the analogy of a surprisingly spacious storefront bistro offering a quirky and satisfying tasting menu. Umbrella tables on the uneven sidewalk, the best vermouth (Boissiere of course) aperitif, window boxes overflowing with vines and blossoms, silent ubiquitous service with only the rare ironic smirk. And open on holidays, fair or foul.

What kind of restaurant are you? Whom is it your business to restore, when, why, and how?

def: res·tau·rant   (rstr-nt, -t-r�nt) n.   [French, restorative soup, restaurant, from present participle of restaurer, to restore, from Old French restorer. See restore.] According to popular history, the first restaurants' purpose was to serve healthy restoratifs / soup to the public. Customers often were the upper classes seeking respite from the heaviness of their habitual elaborate cuisine.

Interview via Kottke.org

Needlewomen, contd.

So weave.

Said to be a German proverb.

In the spirit of the season, up to  5 readers may ask to receive this original limited-edition image (c. 2004 fishy art co) printed on high-quality paper, further pen-enhanced by the artist.  good_and_happy at yahoo dot com. Good&Happy reserves the right to extend or cancel this offer without notice.

The Next Step

December 21, 2004

Honda's Asimo robot.

Via kottke.org.

Practical Matters

WSJ's (subscription only) research-based easy life-long health enhancements, inter alia:

• Go to bed and to sleep earlier rather than later.
• By eating more fruits and vegetables, one naturally cuts back on calorie intake. Less obsession with the forbidden.
• Watch funny movies, or sitcoms.

The great series are disappearing, but can be found on DVD and syndication.  Nominations for classics:  John Cleese as a marriage counselor on Cheers; Robert's proposal and wedding on Everybody Loves Raymond; Rachel "gets over" Ross on Friends; Wings' Helen drives the jeep through the hangar, or masquerades as a born-again evangelist married to an insurance salesman; Baby Maggie retrieves the pacifiers on The Simpsons. That last one has the bonus of Marge as Blanche ("This Bewitching Floozie") and Ned Flanders as Stanley in a musical A Streetcar Named Desire. The data show that just thinking about watching something funny can enhance the immune system.

So submit your nominations for classic-funny. good_and_happy at yahoo dot com. The life you save may be your own.

Excel Tutorial:

Someone (My Bad! I forgot) pointed to this drastic price reduction in Excel lessons on CD. Free, with $8 shipping. Dancing with Excel is great [mental] exercise. We can't vouch for this particular series, but will for sure take a chance since it didn't start out free. Microsoft Excel is one of the software programs (don't even mention Adobe Illustrator!) that is impenetrable to our preferred learning style of a few intuitive experiments and menu investigations.  Instruction is indispensable. 

Very satisfying to see those spreadsheets do the talking.