Yea, the sparrow hath found an house, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, even thine altars, O Lord of hosts, my King, and my God.
But it sort of feels like this, in a way that's hard to describe.
I do my laundry by hand, on the whole. In the bath. And I hang it on the line.
I'm amazed all the time at the things my friends think are absolute necessities. I don't want a washer, and couldn't afford to run one of those wasteful things if I had one. The gas for heating the water, the electricity, the water itself. And for what? So I can save time and effort. Yes? Time that could be better spent doing what? Surfing the net, perhaps? Watching TV?
The picture to the left is page 8 of the Luttrell Psalter.
Yep. I remember never having any money because I could never make it to the bank for their stupid "banking hours" which were like, noon to three pm every other day except weekends.(Also, I've always been irrationally afraid of banks. And the post office. I hate that stuff.) I remember when only a tiny fraction of the population, wealthy people, had credit cards, and if you ran out of cash on the weekend, you just had to spend the rest of the time doing free stuff. The park was nice. So was the beach. Free and fun.
These days, every time I wander around the house asking, "Where's my damn phone?!" I bring myself up and say, "What? 'Where's the phone?... 'Where's the phone'? What kind of question even is that?" Not that long ago you would have been thought insane. The answer was always the same: "It's attached to the wall where it always is... Are you demented?"
Lately I've been just leaving my phone off all the time. I like my phone because it can't get the innernet and because it's a flip phone that I bought because it looks just like Captain Kirk's phone, which is still cool to me. I sampled the Basilica's bells one day on a feast day and made that my alarm, so the Norcia bells ring for me when it's time for the Divine Office.
But just in the last couple of weeks, I've just been leaving it at home when I go out. I thought, wait, why would I want to talk on the phone while I'm out and doing things? That's a pain. And people phoning me? Yee! Who needs that? If people send me messages or call, my phone will tell me later... so I can ignore them more effectively. Like, on purpose instead of by accident.
So now basically I just use it as an answering machine. At some point, I think I might get some crazy glue and stick it to the wall in the kitchen, and my regression back to the mid-20th century will be complete.
What I like about Norcia is not only the food, the people, the weather, the monks, but the culture. This is a place that loves its traditions, and keeps them very consciously as a shield against the outer world that is becoming denuded of unique traditional life.
This is is a little video I took last winter on the Festa di Sant'Antonio when the townspeople bring their animals up to the monastery of St. Anthony and the priest blesses them all, and they have a little festa.
This is a capital from a 15th century graduale (in the British Library,) with a little miniature portrait of St. Benedict and there's a hedgehog. Why is there a hedgehog? Because they're cute and people like 'em, that's why.
That's the middle ages.
I'm getting better with gouache, and having fun with marginalia. This is my version of a 12th century bunny playing an oboe.
In monasteries, novices were never allowed near a psalter book. Part of the training of a young monk was to memorise the entire psalter. Once he could recite it all from memory (in Latin, of course) he was taught to translate it. He learned the chant by rote.
Only a small group of monks in any monastery were chosen to form a "schola" in which they would learn the difficult parts of the Office, the hymns and complicated antiphons for the big feasts. In the schola, the single large song book would be placed on a tall lectern and the monks would gather 'round and all sing from the same book, with one monk given the task of turning the pages as they went along.
This is what our monks do here in Norcia, though of course, novices are no longer required to memorize the entire 150 Psalms.
A friend in the UK has expressed an interest in building her own house, and we were talking about our shared ambitions to not live in the standard middle-class type of dwelling that most people in our culture take for granted as "normal". I have been a member of various internet groups that talk about "natural" or "sustainable" building techniques that are starting to grow in popularity around the western world.
They take their inspiration mainly from ancient, pre-industrial techniques that were used nearly everywhere in Europe for thousands of years. Most significantly, they were used by the people who wanted to live in the dwelling. In other words, it used to be normal for people to build and maintain their own housing. The idea that the only way to own a home is to buy one ready-built, the suburban model, seems to be a product of Modernia that really took off after WWII and the great suburbanization of our populations. Which is itself an outgrowth of the post-Industrial Revolution thing of packing everyone together into cities so they can take a "job" working for someone else. It is, in other words, the final defeat of the old Catholic feudal/agricultural model, and one that I believe is perhaps the single most morally, socially and physically destructive development of human history.
Back in the day, and not too long ago, it was considered unremarkable for people to acquire a piece of property and build a house on it. My grandparents did it. Back when Vancouver Island was a remote backwater hardly anyone wanted to live on, they bought a 1/4 acre for $2000, high up on a cliff above the sea, with a fantastic view of the Nanoose inlet off the south side of the property. They built a small but beautiful two-bedroom house and a garden, mainly on the flat part in the front of the property, and a rock garden and container vegetable garden on the little bits of flat at the back of the house. They lived there until my grandfather's death, and it is still to this little pocket of paradise that my subconscious goes when I am anxious about the world or about life.
My friend agrees that the mass-produced, cookie-cutter, suburbanised direction our societies' domestic architecture has taken since the War has been gravely damaging. The idea of getting "on the housing ladder," that is, "buying" a "starter-home" by locking yourself into a titanic morgtage for the rest of your life is a thought that fills me with horror. Because the reality is simply not what we are being told. You do not become a "homeowner" this way; you become a mortgage-slave to a bank, who are the ones who really own your home and rule your life. This seems to me to be like voluntarily enslaving yourself to an evil macro-culture that is bent on the destruction of everything I love and hold dear. When my friend told me that she and her husband were considering "just getting on the housing ladder" I felt depressed and a little suffocated at the thought.
One of the "hippie" things my mother instilled in me that really stuck was a horror of debt. I would rather have a ball and chain attached to my ankle than be in serious debt, either with credit cards or student loans or a mortgage. When I was a kid, my mother got a bill from Visa that had attached interest at a rate of 22%. My mother, being ahh... somewhat less reserved than I... wrote a very elegant letter to Visa along with the cheque that said that if we were in biblical times, the entire pack of them would be stoned to death for the capital crime of usury. Along with this, she included the tiny little pieces of plastic that were all that was left of her Visa card.
But I want my own home, and am starting to want it more and more each year. My friend feels the same, and she is currently living in a beautiful old house that, through various happy accidents, she and her husband live in rent-free. But this situation could be taken out from under them at any moment, and she doesn't like the idea of pouring money down the bottomless rent-hole either. She said, however, that she was open to the idea of building, and I said I was looking closely at this new "natural building" trend that seems to be going around the world among people who also don't want to opt into the evils of the modern macro-culture. I said I would poke around and find some information for her.
Here is a video interview of one of the guys who started this movement, Ianto Evans, a Welshman who feels as we do about it all. "Any kind of loan for something you can't afford is asking for trouble. If you're already in that situation, get out of it. And if you're not, for heaven sake, don't get into it."
I've already posted this video, but it's worth looking at again:
"As an architect who spent five years years in school and at the end of it couldn't build a house, had you told me this fifteen years ago, I would never have believed you, I would never have believed that you could learn to build your own house in a ten-day workshop. But the proof is there by the dozens of people who have now gone out and done that. Once you don't have to be paying a mortgage on your home, then maybe you don't need to have two cars for each of you to get to work... and then maybe you don't need so much income. And then maybe you can keep your kids at home and grow a big garden. And do thngs together as a family..."
There seem to be generally three categories: straw bale, "cob" and, less often, "cordwood". Personally, I am most attracted to "cob,"
which seems to be a reiteration of the ancient wattle and daub technique.
There are a lot of groups in Britain and elsewhere that help people learn how to do this and, as with all these alternative living movements, the internet is the best way to find them and get in touch with them.
Here is the website of Cob Cottage Company, that gives people workshops in Oregon.
Here is the iLoveCob website where there are a lot of quite inspirational photos of the extremely charming houses that are possible to build using this technique.
And this is the little cottage a guy in the UK built for ₤150. This is is his blog: Michael Buck
Here's more
From what I have seen, there is a movement in the same alternative building community, to turn back to other traditional building work, like the use of whole-timber for framing, found timber, recycled and salvaged materials.
And I really see no reason at all why all of these could not be combined to create a home like this:
I will mention only one more thing. I take the occasional look at the boards at the local realtors' offices and there are regular postings of agricultural properties. One of them was 7000 square meters, up on the lower slopes of the Norcia valley, and was selling for €22,000.
The Independent is having a hissy-fit over someone telling the blunt truth about the absurdities of the contemporary art world. But he should have been a little broader with that brush. Women do make up the majority of students in contemporary art schools, but what are they being taught?
Because it's mostly females entering the "contemporary art scene," and therefore producing the crap that contemporary art is, it does not follow that the women-artists are producing crappy art because they're women. It might have something to do with the crappy teaching, and the valuing of crap that is the singular earmark of the contemporary art world.
The Indie's Nick Clarke whines that he has "has dismissed centuries of female artists at a stroke – from Artemisia Gentileschi and Frida Kahlo to Bridget Riley and Paula Rego..."
Mmmm... let's take a look, shall we?
"Judith" Artemisia Gentileschi
"Frida Kahlo" Frida Kahlo (whom Wikipedia described as "self-portrait artist and feminist icon...)
Bridget Riley (I think I see where we're going here...)
Paula Rego (definitely getting the pattern...)
I'm gonna take a wild stab in the dark and say that when he talks about women artists not passing "the market test, the value test”, that he isn't thinking of Gentileschi, but more the likes of Tracey Emin who once admitted that some of her "best" drawings were done while she was blind drunk.
I like the internet as much as the next Facebook addict, but I know full well that it's not good for me. I know that the internet isn't good for the world, for our societies. It's not bringing more happiness, more "social cohesion" or stability, more intelligence or mental or emotional health.
A lot would change and there would be many problems if the internet simply stopped working (massive solar flare perhaps?) but putting the world back to a state in which we must interact with each other in "real time" would not, in the long run, be anything but a good thing. The internet has made much of our lives artificial, unReal. I sometimes wonder what it would take to get it out of my life.
Is the internet just another idol? Is entertainment killing our souls? I imagine that someone like Fr. Faber would think so. Probably this guy would too.
Mr. John Collingwood, I salute you for a sensible fellow, and I envy you your freedom from the mind-numbing and soul-choking encumberments of Modernia.
I remember the day, back when I lived in North Vancouver, that I called up the Sally Anne and asked them to come and take away my TV. I had bought it second hand, and it was huge and filled not only my living room with its baleful unblinking eye, but my entire life. One day after work, I was watching the news, and there was an item in which some young thugs had broken into a children's petting zoo and had bludgeoned a donkey to death, just for the fun of it. Something in me snapped, and I thought, "What do I "need to know" that for? How has that improved my mind, my life or my knowledge?"
As soon as it was gone, I realised how addicted I had become to the wretched thing. Every day, several times a day, I would find myself mindlessly groping for the remote control in an effort to take my brain away from the real world. It took a while to adjust, but in the end, I found it was enormously worth it. That was about 1994.
Then the internet came.
When I worked in Toronto, I lived in a beautiful old house that I shared with a group of other ladies who also didn't make a lot of money. We didn't have a microwaver or a TV, and I think only one of us had a cell, but we made sure to get internet access right away. But in those days, with my room filled with lovely tatty old fashioned furniture, I used to finish my job and put my computer away in a cupboard, roll up the cables and stash them out of sight, and all traces of the 21st century would instantly vanish.
I wonder what has happened to me that I have left that very healthy practice?
Hell, I never even liked the phone, even when it was safely contained by being attached to the wall. The day I found myself trying to answer my mobile phone while I was riding my bike, while the phone was in my handbag in the front basket, while I was trying to turn left in a busy intersection, was the day I knew the mobile had got hold of my brain. I should have won the Darwin Award that day.
The phone is a bad invention for those of us with crippling social anxieties. But in another way, the internet is worse because it allows us to hide much more effectively from our friends, from life and The Real.
Maybe I should be making more efforts to hide from Modernia and live in The Real.
All change is bad, even change for the better. This is mostly because the humans are far, far less clever than we think we are, and rarely know what is going to be best for ourselves.
"Kids. Can’t stand ‘em. Monsters of ego, every one. You know how you can tell a kid from a leech? That’s a trick question: you can’t. Well, actually, you can. If a leech gets hold of you, you can burn it off with a Bic lighter. Try that with a kid, and sure as you’re born, the little bastard will scream and cry like a Templar at the stake. Then he’ll tell his parents and you’ll get a nasty letter from your vicar general.
Small wonder nobody wants to have ‘em anymore. They’re plumb useless. In the old days, you could put ‘em to work — small hands were made for cleaning out machinery. You could send one off to the army, to be a drummer, or to the navy, to be a powder monkey. If the kid was a girl, you could marry it off, although I’m sure those dowries tended to eat into the old retirement fund. I’m not sure I completely hold with that dothead practice of eighty-sixing girl children, but then, every man of affairs has to cut down on his overhead somehow. It’s a dog-eat-dog world, and there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
So, I take it upon myself, as a pastor and catechist, to strip these little maggots of any illusions about the world, specifically, about their own significance in it. Whenever one tells me, “Good morning, Father,” I’ll ask, “What have you done for me lately?” Or I’ll say, “You want it to be a good morning? Wash my car. That’d be good.” And then, to drive home the point — because, God knows, this is an ignorant generation — I’ll flip the bird.
I think it’s a shame that bullying’s gotten such a bad name lately. It’s a useful practice. First, it serves as a sop for kids’ ambient annoyingness; every hour that kids spend picking on each other is an hour they don’t spend bothering me. Second, it teaches kids deference to people bigger than themselves, which may be the only hedge against complete anarchy. Finally, it inculcates values. If there were no bullies, how would kids know that being ugly or fat or a homo is a bad thing? If you just said, “From their parents,” then by all means, let’s check your credit so we can get you into that beachfront condo in Yuma, Arizona with all deliberate speed.
Blessing kids in the Communion line? I found a way to put an end to that particular brand of post-Conciliar idiocy. My friend Dave, a Navigator in the K of C who sings tenor in the choir, picks off the grubs with a wrist rocket. Nothing makes for good catechesis like a stainless-steel ball-bearing in the face. How the Council Fathers at Trent failed to come up with that one I’ll never know — they must have been having an off day.
Every now and then, some hand-wringing liberal sob sister will try to argue that Jesus loved kids. I always tell ‘em the same thing: “Screw you, buddy, and the hybrid car you rode in on. Did Jesus pick any kids to be His Apostles? I don’t think so. When He raised that kid from the dead, did He mollycoddle her with a lot of baby talk? Hell, no; He told her, “GET UP!”, plain and ugly. I’m sure his next words were, “Make yourself useful — set the damn table, or I’ll take the skin off your ass.” If the Son of Man was Mr. Rogers, then how come you never see him in a cardigan sweater? Riddle me that, Batman."
I hear the guy's a Jesuit. Time was, all Jesuits were like this. Just picture him saying it with a cigar in the corner of his mouth and you'll get it.
So, I took today to work on my book and I've been reading a little of Leon Battista Alberti's "brief" treatise On Painting, and it immediately became apparent that in order to even follow this great man's thinking on the subject of painting, I am going to have to revisit mathematics, particularly geometry.
A few months ago, a reader kindly fulfilled one of my Amazon Wishlist wishes, and sent me all three volumes of Euclid's Elements. Many years ago, I took a remedial mathematics course and did quite well. I later discovered the reason for this. It was obvious from the layout of the course that its author had been a big fan of Euclid. All the proposals were laid out in my course in a logical and wondrously clear pattern from simplest concepts to greater and greater complexity.
By the end of this short course, I had discovered that not only was I not completely hopeless about maths, but there was in this Geometry business some elusive key to the secrets of the universe. Like a kind of map to God. It certainly became clear why the Pythagoreans worshipped mathematics like a god. This revelation is one of the key things I hope to lay out in my own book on re-creating the thought processes of the study of classical drawing and painting.
Book One of Alberti's treatise consists of over 6000 words on the mathematics behind perspective and composition. The work was, of course, intended for the sons of educated 15th century gentlemen who would have received Euclid as the beginning and end of their studies in mathematics and for whom Alberti's ideas were merely the application of these abstract concepts to a concrete form. But to us half-illiterate moderns, the damn thing is nearly incomprehensible. (And the edition I have found online has no pictures. This subject really does need illustrations!)
I think I'd better fetch my copy of Euclid from the office where it has very eruditely decorated my desk for some time.
Update:
What? People do Euclid as a hobby all the time, don't they? It's not weird.
Mark Leidhauser has held in his hands more great works of art than any king of pope or Medici ever did. A senior curator at the National Gallery, he oversees the framing of the paintings...
"Let's say I took one of our more abstract masterpieces, say an Ellsworth Kelly, and removed it from its frame, marched it down the 52 steps that people walk up to get to the National Gallery, past the giant columns, and brought it into a restaurant. It's a $5 million painting. And it's one of those restaurants where there are pieces of original art for sale, by some industrious kids from the Corcoran School, and I hang that Kelly on the wall with a price tag of $150. No one is going to notice it. An art curator might look up and say: 'Hey, that looks a little like an Ellsworth Kelly. Please pass the salt.'"
Intelligent comment from the Adam Smith Institute on why the British Housing Estates need to be knocked down as soon as possible:
Opposition to post-war architecture tends to focus on aesthetic concerns. And, certainly, much of it is appalling ugly, almost to the point that merely looking at it fills you with despair. But its mostly deeply pernicious effect is surely the way in which it has affected people’s behaviour, by forcing them to live in an environment which is cold, desolate and practically inhuman. Naturally, I am not suggesting that post-war architecture caused the riots. But the idea that it was a contributory factor certainly has the ring of truth about it.
He mentions similar constructions in Italy.
Incidentally, the picture I’ve used here is not actually from a post-war London housing estate. It is a photo of the Vele di Scampia estate near Naples, which was the setting for the stunning, shocking film Gomorrah. If you’re sceptical about the social consequences of bad architecture, I’d challenge you to watch that film and, bearing in mind that it is based on real events, ask yourself whether many of the things depicted would be possible in a traditional street layout. For me, it’s a shining example of brutalist by name, brutal by nature.
I went down south with a bunch of friends last year to visit Monte Cassino and on the drive we had to go through some little towns that looked as if they had been built after the Second World War when some Italian government official decided to make the entire country into a suitable movie location for nihilist post-apocalyptic filmmaker. As a bonus, the population seemed to be practising to gain employment as zombie extras the same films.
I've never in my life seen any human dwelling more closely resembling a gargantuan garbage heap.
Scruton has quite a bit to say on the subj. Starting about 7:14
Vicky and I have been having a good time watching Downton Abbey and she has been getting screen caps of some of the more luscious outfits. They're a bit fuzzy, but they give the general gist well enough.
From these, I'm doing some sketches and we'll see about working up some patterns.
I have simply come to the conclusion that there aren't any clothes in the shops that I want to buy (unless I happen to be in Florence, which I'm not most of the time) so the only solution is to make my own.
One of the many things I've been planning on doing "when it's all over" is start the creation of an entire wardrobe of exquisite and meticulously crafted hand made clothes. So, now's the time.
Clothes. We just started watching Downton Abbey tonight, with episode one. All sorts of interesting characters and plot and whatnot, all very engaging, but of course, the thing I was going nuts over were the clothes. The 1912-1920 period is my all-time number-one top-favourite for women's clothes (for men, it's easily 1802-1820 ... can't resist a tall white collar, crisp cravat and black cutaway).
A few months ago, I splurged on a lovely bit of 60 inch wide robin's egg blue blouse weight linen and have been planning on using it to make a blouse along the lines pictured above. I saw Elizabeth McGovern wearing something like it in the 2007 ITV version of Room with a View.
This blouse was a very common pattern for the time. Variations include raglan sleeves, long shawl collars and a square neckline. Must have it.
Must also have this brown coat with the velvet revers
