Product Placement

The last Yuletide fallout: what with all the gift-giving of a few days ago, we're adjusting to living with our new possessions. Stuff maketh not the man, of course, but there's no denying—it's a material world, and I am a material girl...

D's brand-new discs of Scandinavian neo-folk music are currently rocking the house. Ferocious shrieking ecstasy—makes me wonder what the bedrooms of Finland sound like on a Saturday night...

Some time ago, there was a discussion on the Barbelith Undergound that asked the musical question, "Is it okay for men to moisturize?" Apparently D thinks so: there was coffee-essence body butter in my stocking, along with a bergamot-scented cleanser. Bergamot's wot gives Earl Grey its distinctive bouquet—so the net effect is that I smell like a fucking Starbuck's.

Also scored much lovely clothing and the His Dark Materials novels, which is like Gnosticism For Kids. Great stuff: The Invisibles re-imagined as a pastoral fantasy.

I got Claire comic books—sorry, graphic novels—this year: she's four now, and reads pretty well, and, well, it's never too early to hook 'em on the artform I love so much. So she scored the Spiegleman/Mouly-edited anthology Little Lit, which is admirably rough around the edges—fairy tales are supposed to be scary, dammit!—and immaculately designed (and which is not to be confused with this outfit, which promises "Hours of Gospel Centered Fun for Your Favorite Little Ones"—yikes!).

Also Jill Thompson's weird and whimsical Scary Godmother—not a perfect book, I'm afraid (it can't decide if it's comics or prose, and doesn't quite succeed as either) but a fun read nonetheless—and Jay Hosler's Clan Apis, which is much too advanced for her but which she loves nonetheless: when she saw the crisp black-and-white pages, she cried, "It's a coloring comic book!"

We'd better be careful. At this rate, she might end up an artist or something.
She could do worse.

More Yuletide fallout.

Warning: Catholic apologia herein.

Back at work, the week between Christmas and New Year's. It's an unfamiliar feeling for me; my first Christmastide back in Corporate America after eight years working in academia. But even though I'm back at my desk, my spiritual preoccupations linger. On the advice of my confessor, I've set aside ten minutes a day for prayer...

Mm. My confessor. How, uh... quaint.

The sacrament of Penance is out of fashion, yeah. I don't do it often—usually only during Advent, when my temper is at its shortest and my self-loathing at its highest—that is, when I need it the most.

There's a lot of resistance to the idea of absolution via public confession of sins--the apparent paradox of admitting misdeeds to a priest, who is, after all, Just A Guy and Just As Fucked-Up And Prone To Sin As Oneself. At first glance, the idea of private confession—i.e., speaking directly to God in prayer and receiving absolution straight from Him—makes more sense, no?

But there is, as there often is, beauty in the paradox. It takes humility to admit one's sins directly to God, even to oneself; how much more humility to admit them to someone who's Just Another Sinner? How much more sincere the repentance? And how astonishing to find absolution, to see God's grace at work, through such a flawed conduit? It doesn't cheapen the absolution: rather, it exalts the absolver.

There's more to this than I'm qualified to discuss. I wanted to link to a long article (two full pages in the front section!) that ran in the 10 December 2000 Boston Sunday Globe, but I couldn't seem to find it their archives. It was essentially a 3,000-word blowjob for the Church, but it was intelligent, engagingly written, and frank in its acknowledgment that penance is in danger of vanishing entirely from mainstream American Catholicism.

On a somewhat weirder note, a Google search on "penance" turned up all kinds of creepy shit, including an X-Men fan page, a dodgy dark metal band, stories from alt.sex.spanking, the pathetic and frightening "True Catholic Church," (to which I shall surely turn my attentions again, some day), and a boatload of sad goth stuff, including generous dollops of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanfic.

Jesus wept, indeed.

Pointless Observation:

"Merry Christmas" and "Hare Krishna" sound sort of alike, if you mumble.

Someday I'm going to write a story about a hard-boiled Hindu detective, and I'm going to name him Harry Krishna.

Nails

Crescent sun yesterday was pleasantly eerie. Smart-arse item header in yesterday's Globe: "Noontime darkness not expected to last."

I am generally content with my lot in life: while I have occasionally wished to be someone else, I'm pretty happy with the world and my place in it.

That said: this guy has what I imagine must be the best job in the entire goddam world.

A Child's Christmas In America

This just in: Christmas as we know it in America is an artificial construct. We all know that, of course, and we can name some of the conspirators: Thomas Nast, the Coca-Cola corporation (maybe), and Clement Clarke moore, putative author of “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” a/k/a “’Twas the Night Before Christmas.”

But Moore was, in fact, part of a cabal of patrician New Yorkers whose stated aim was to create a new, synthetic, uniquely American Christmas tradition—and to this end, Moore in all likelihood plagiarized “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” passing off the work of Major Henry Livingston as his own.
An odd (and ultimately successful) experiment in 19th Century social engineering. It makes for a fascinating sory—and (again, when viewed through a revolutionary filter) potentially a very useful one for the modern social revolutionary.

The Merriest

Off to the Revels tomorrow—an event to which I’ve been looking forward since last year. The music is guaranteed great, as always: the Revels (and other artists, spiritual though secular) have been a great source of songs for my choir’s Christmas concert.

The Revels, Inc., organization fascinates me, too—it manage to be a multimedia conglomerate (record label, publishing house, and loose affiliation of theater troupes across America) while:

(a) doing well by doing good—i.e., remaining a non-profit with a primary mission to educate and entertain;

(b) remaining a quick & mobile intelligent collective of small autonomous units;

(c) filling every seat at every performance even while trafficking in a cultural product that by rights should be of interest only to early-music scholars, folklorists, and ethnomusicologists, and;

(d) finding their vision of the future in days long gone, with a spirit not of nostalgia but of reclamation—joining with Shakespeare & Co. to mount a production of the mystery plays, fa chrissakes.

An interesting sidepoint: when viewed through a revolutionary filter, everything looks like a model for the revolution.

Forward into the past!

But the music isn’t all of it; it is ritual, and drama—liturgy, in a way—and the Church I serve could take a lesson from the Revels’ syncretic savvy. By happy coincidence, we’ll be Reveling on the date of the Solstice, which of course has always had religious significance. The attachment of its date to Christian feast was a masterstroke of marketing for a new religion. Some see this as the Church “co-opting” the festival of Yule, and in a sense that’s true. But the Revels approach seems to me a saner response than the attempts of various Christian and pagan groups to “reclaim the season”—rather than making the Solstice a point of contention, the Revels instead takes it as common ground. Which is as it should be: no one group can lay claim to the works of Nature, it rains on the just and the unjust alike, and allah that.

And there’s an eclipse of the sun—62% total, where I live, and smack in the middle of the day—on Christmas Day! How perfect is that, for the closing moments of this weird ghost-year, the real last year of the 20th century? Impending darkness, rebirth, and the triumph of the light as we move into the third millennium.

In America, anyway.