Got here just in time

A flood warning has been issued as the remnants of Hurricane Thomas head for Irish shores.



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Note to self

Never get Japanese food in Dublin again.



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Aslan is Tash, Tash is Aslan

get that through your heads!



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Well, Chickadees,

I'm off again for a few days. I'll be in Dublin til Mon.

No comments like, "Wow, Dublin. That's cool" if you please.

I would rather gnaw my own leg out of a steel trap than get on a plane right now. Just at the moment, I'm more in a mood to hide under the bed, so really...

Don't know how much posting I'll be doing, so play nicely.

Anyway, here's a few random pics to amuse you.

Finished my second Bargue drawing today. It didn't take nearly so many hours to finish this one as the last and she was more complex. It's going well, I think.

From this


to this


to this


to this


e basta.


So I started on the Horse head right away.


Found this neat store that sells and repairs casts of famous things. Just up a bit from Piazza della Republica, on the way up to Santa Susanna.





Visited the nuns at San Vincenzo last weekend.


They have donkeys. They loved to be petted. When you go up to the fence, they come right over to have their ears rubbed.



Got along with the cat pretty well too.


The "new" monastery is fully restored. Built in the 11th and 12th centuries.


Little bits of the old monastery of San Vincenzo can be seen all over,


as well as plenty of old Roman columns from the Roman villa the first foundation was built on.


This thousand year old stone lion still guards the front gate.




along with a slightly newer friend.


When the nuns (from Regina Laudis in the US) first arrived in 1990, a lot of it was in ruins. It had been abandoned for 200 years.


The nearby towns, this is Rocceta al Volturno, were all built in the 9th and tenth centuries after the Saracens destroyed the old San Vincenzo monastic city. The people all literally took to the hills in a process called "encastellation".


Then... the "new" Romanesque church of San Vincenzo, built in the 10th century. The old one (8th century) was burned by the Mohammedans.


...and now


The church as it has been restored since the nuns arrived.


A bit austere for my taste.


The stones, still being recovered, from the old San Vincenzo, some of them still bearing the faint traces of the frescoes for which the monastery was famous.





From the olive groves. The nuns have over 400 trees, and could use a little help in harvest time.

As I was walking through the olive groves, I was wondering if I ought to have been wearing boots, against snakes.


Sure enough...

We also heard wolves at night, and I was told that since the population has been falling, the wolves are getting bolder. The monastery lost a sheep one day some years ago, right out of one of the front fields in broad daylight. I was told not to take walks at night, or even go out into the courtyard.


The newly restored church, behind the apse, with some of the ancient masonry.


Another nearby encastellated town.


One of the monastery's old outbuildings. Restored to serve as the nuns' pottery. One of the sisters,


Mother Philippa, is an archaeologist and she was fascinated by some of the ancient Samnite tombs they found while digging in front of the Church. They date to the 6th century BC. She started studying the pottery techniques and has made a lot of Samnite pottery.


Mother Philippa, the potter, in a rare moment when she was not smiling.

And the fruit...


I picked and ate a lot of figs.


And took home about 5 pounds of crab apples.


As well as about the same of rose hips.


They said I could come back and pick sloes. They're best for gin if you wait until the first frost.


And I said I would come back and help with the olive harvest.


The dogs and I went for a walk along the ridge, and came across this hut. Something to do with sheep, perhaps? Heaven only knows how old it is.


"Listen my son, and incline thine ear..."



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Speechless

Riveted with horror...

The man in the black frock is the Abbot Primate of the Benedictine Order.

You can thank Chris Gillibrand for today's little NewChurch kick in the head.



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What can go wrong?

Sometimes the whole "alpha male" thing goes terribly wrong.

I once wrote an essay about Michael Corleone and The Godfather, (that I still contend was the greatest film ever made) in which I proposed that it was Michael's inversion of the hierarchy of love that corrupted him. He became a monster out of love for his father, which he placed above the love of God.

Don't love the creature more than you love the Creator.

It goes badly.



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What do we think of this?

Here's something interesting. Not quite sure what I make of it.

Welcome to Taken In Hand, a website about wholehearted sexually exclusive marriages in which, to the delight of both spouses, the man actively controls the woman. The degree of control and the way the husband retains control vary from Taken In Hand couple to Taken In Hand couple, but in all cases both husband and wife actively want the husband to have the upper hand. No matter how strong, tough and forceful a Taken In Hand wife may be, and no matter how hard she might try to take control in their marriage, she would be aghast if her husband were to let her get the upper hand. Likewise, no matter how loving, kind and considerate the husband may be, he prefers to keep his wife firmly in hand.

Pretty counter-cultural, I'd say.

It seems to almost entirely consist of contributions from readers, not sociologists or headshrinkers or accredited "experts", but regular people who relate their own experiences.

It appears to be mostly an English/UK thing, but looks a lot like those websites from the US made by evangelical Prods where they talk quite freely about "male-led" relationships and marriage.

It's pretty freewheeling, especially in the comments, and some of it can get pretty racy, but I see that there are rules against vulgarity or explicit descriptions.

I wanted my site to be one in which private information (such as intimate details about what posters do in the bedroom, or wherever) would remain private rather than appearing on the site. I wanted my site to appeal as much to Orthodox rabbis, conservative Christians and readers' parents or grandparents, as to individuals who might also read obviously racy, graphic sites.

A lot of it is about err... "domestic discipline," which I know a lot of conservative Prods approve of, though I have no idea how the Catholic Trads would feel.

One thing I like about it right off the bat is that it will obviously make the feminists' heads come right the heck off and explode.

EHKS-SPLODE!

The first three headlines on the front page are:

"She needs me to be firmly in charge"...

"How to get into the right mindset for taking control of her?"

"How can a laidback man get into the right mindset to take control?"

I have to say, just sitting here fantasizing about the screeching and howling is doing me a world of good...

That faint popping sound you hear...

I am getting the feeling that there are a lot more women writing in to sites like Taken in Hand, and others like the American Protestant male-led relationship sites, but fewer men. I was wondering if this is because more women are coming to resent the limitations that our feminism-dominated western society has placed on them. I think that there is a strong undercurrent in society against marriage that hardly ever gets talked about. But women have always and will always want to get married, and at least nowadays, men seem to have pretty strong resistance to that.

I think more women are finally seeing that they have been sold a bill of goods, that feminism has done nothing but ruin the marriage market. It has turned women into harridans no decent man in his right mind would want to marry, and has turned men into perpetual teenagers who seek nothing in life more than the next quick, meaningless liaison.

The feminist movement has given men the freedom not to marry and made it easier for them to get what they want (sex) without having to “pay” for it with marriage. Feminism has done women this terrible disservice in telling them they can sleep around just like men, and have careers and be “successful”. This would be fine if it weren’t for the fact that women really don't want that. Or are starting to realise that it's not what it was cracked up to be.

I read once that a big reason that Blue Whales are now so rare, is that even after the whaling moratoriums were in place, there were so few of them left that they could not find each other in the sea to reproduce. I get the feeling that some of us old fashioned, traditional sort of people are like blue whales and finding each other in the vast and hostile oceans of the world, (a world, moreover, in which we are now in the position of having to remain strictly closeted) has become very difficult.

Let’s hear it for the internet then!



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How to get married

I've recently come to the conclusion (ok, it wasn't recently, but I've recently had it hammered into my skull like the tent peg that went into the head of that guy in the Bible) that "dating" is stupid.

It's stupid and destructive. It damages kids, teenagers (I could cite the stats, but we all know, don't we...we remember), it damages people who would just plain like to get married and stop all this idiot messing about. It damages people who fail in the 'dating game'.

In fact, the term 'dating game' is pretty appropriate. It's playing games with your heart and with your future.

And it's vulgar. Quite frankly, it's undignified and should be rejected on those grounds alone.

So where does that leave those of us who would like to be married but find the 'dating game' repellant? I think we are in a pickle. The old rules, and the structures are pretty much eradicated. It used to involve families, and other interested parties. But we don't have those anymore. In fact, the tidal wave of divorce, that hit the West Coast just about at the time my mother was getting into her encounter group lifestyle in the early 70s, has made it extremely difficult for people even to believe that getting married, let alone staying that way, is even possible.

When I was going into grade five, I had come out of a hippie 'free school' ("Sundance"... I kid you not) and my mother noticed that I didn't know anything. The hippies were so busy encouraging us to express ourselves that they forgot to teach me the times tables. (Thank God I already knew how to read, and lose myself in a book). When she panicked and realised I needed to be sent to a real school, I asked to go to a Catholic school. It was rather a new environment, I'll tell you. I went from a place where nearly all the kids came from single-parent "families" to one where nearly all the kids came from normal homes, two parents and one house in which they had lived all their lives. (I didn't exactly fit in...)

I think that was about 1975.

By the time I left St. Pat's and went into junior high, three years later, nearly all the kids' parents were divorced.

It happened that fast.

Is it any wonder most of the people I knew, out there in the secular world, before I managed to climb out of the mire, regarded marriage as some kind of sick joke? The idea that people get married and stay married, that they take it seriously like in the Olden Days, would make most of my old acquaintances laugh. No one even knows how to do it these days. I mean, apart from the whole "getting together" and "having a relationship" stuff, what else is there to do?

The Jews have an idea. I have one Jewish friend: Rabbi Yehuda Levin. He lives in New York and has nine kids. He's a pretty young guy, by modern standards, to have kids who are old enough to get married, but the last time he was in Rome, he told me he had to get back to New York to arrange his son's wedding. He asked me, as he has done every time we've met since the first time nearly ten years ago, when I was getting married. It's a big thing for Jews, I guess, and they still know how to do it, because their social system hasn't been blasted to smithereens by the Asteroid.

And they also think "dating" is stupid. Spiritually and morally dangerous.

Traditional Jews lead a modest social life. Teenagers don't date or go to parties, and boys and girls don't spend time with each other socially. While we're growing up, we don't get into emotional entanglements worrying about how popular we are, or who is more popular, or who we're going to go out with.

None of that happens at all in our community because we think it's unfair. It's not nice, and it doesn't do any good. The result is that when we're ready to get married, we're not playing any games. It's not a popularity contest and we're not trying to impress anyone.

When we're ready to get married, we go about it honestly and sincerely. We don't marry the wrong person because we might have been trying to impress somebody or compete with someone. All that is eliminated. We find somebody to marry, we get married, and the marriages last. Divorces happen, but rarely.

We start to date when we're old enough and serious enough to think about being married. When we do go out, it's with someone who has the same values we do. Usually, we come from families who know each other, or we have a mutual friend who thinks we're compatible and introduces us.

...

After we are introduced, we spend time together, and we consider marriage. We want to get to know what's on the other person's mind, what kind of life they want to live, what kind of life they have lived, things that have to do with being married. We wouldn't go to a movie because we want to get to know each other, not a movie. We don't want to waste time doing a lot of activities; we prefer to spend the time talking. We're not looking for a thrill; we're looking to get married.

It's a good system, and a considerate system. It takes into account that people have feelings.

For example, in our tradition, while a man and woman are dating and thinking about marriage, the dating is kept completely secret. They don't talk about it and they don't go where people are going to see them. If it doesn't work out, nobody knows. [And there are no breaks in the social sphere everyone has to continue living in...good idea.]

If it were public, people would wonder, "Why didn't you marry him? Is something wrong with him?" Or, "How come he didn't marry you? Is something wrong with you?" This way is more discreet.

If it works out, everyone is thrilled. If it doesn't work out, no one knows and no one gets hurt.

This seems like a pretty sensible system. It assumes that everyone has the same goal and works in a compassionate way to helping people attain the goal.

So, where's ours? What are we doing about this as Catholics? As "Trads"?

I had thought that in the Trad community there was more or less consensus on the "dating is for marriage" thing. I had assumed that the people who called themselves Trad Catholics had, more or less, the goal of living like normal, sane, grown-up people. That they rejected, along with the idiocies of NewChurch, the parallel rubbish in the secular world of "dating" and courtship.

Nope. Turns out not.



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Mates, maid! how mean you that? no mates for you, Unless you were of gentler, milder mould.

I am ashamed that women are so simple
To offer war where they should kneel for peace;
Or seek for rule, supremacy and sway,
When they are bound to serve, love and obey.

...

Come, come, you froward and unable worms!
My mind hath been as big as one of yours,
My heart as great, my reason haply more,
To bandy word for word and frown for frown;
But now I see our lances are but straws,
Our strength as weak, our weakness past compare,
That seeming to be most which we indeed least are.

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'Cause it's never a bad moment for a Shatner moment

All hail the alpha male


Philandry: it's the new black.



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