A semi-permanent move.

Posted by Davey at 10:48 AM | Comments (0)

For the summer, a new blog: Agnology.

Posted by Davey at 01:31 PM | Comments (1)

For Traditio:

I Told You So: The Satirist as Prophet and Curmudgeon

Posted by Davey at 12:12 PM | Comments (4)

Kate and I made the trek up to Spokane on Wednesday to labor on our registries. I admit the idea of 9 solid hours of window shopping was a bit intimidating (cleaning the Augean stables is the metaphor that comes to this nerdish mind) ... but Kate made the day very enjoyable. When she gets going on something like this, her eyes light up and it's all I can do to keep step with her.

Oh, and a Washington blizzard tried to kill us on the way back home that night.

Anyway, here are some of the registry results. (Oh, the wedding is now on March 9th, btw.)

Macy's

Target

Williams-Sonoma

Posted by Davey at 12:28 PM | Comments (3)

For my Christmas wish-list:

The Fire Bible.

Posted by Davey at 09:10 AM | Comments (6)

Kate made me very happy back on Friday night.* You know that solitary moment when everything you were mulling about for years and years finally falls into place and makes sense? I think Aquinas called it a theology of place - where you know exactly where you're supposed to be and what you should be doing (grossly oversimplified).

It all came to me in a whispered yes.

So I feel like sharing a few pics of my favorite girl with the autumn eyes and a rock that I think fits her rather well.

1: That night at Riverfront Park
2: Another pic downtown, taken by Tamara
3: On the ride back to Moscow (I love this one)
4: Just the rock, after dessert at Cyrus O'Leary's

* That's a severe understatement

Posted by Davey at 11:29 AM | Comments (11)

My family made it to Idaho for Christ Church's Trinity Fest, with the side benefit of being able to see Kara off to college and to meet my favorite redhead. School and work have kept me preoccupied lately, but I stole a few pictures from Kara and thought I'd post them for blog-matter until I actually have something worthwhile to say:

The mini-gallery

Posted by Davey at 09:19 AM | Comments (7)

How very sad.

I remember when I was nine years old -- the highlight of my week was the trip my mom, sister, and I would take down to Venture (a Midwest retail chain slain in the late 90s with great and merciless violence by Walmart). While the girls shopped I would camp out in the baseball card aisle. The early 90s (when I collected) was the height of the late baseball card craze. I remember browsing dozens of brands, some glossy (Fleer), some classic (Topps), some downright ugly (Donruss). I preferred Upper Deck's Collector's Choice. The cards contained the most stats and cost only .99 until around 1996 - perfect for my $1.00 weekly allowance (Mom would often cover the tax). Most afternoons after school I'd spend cataloging my collection (by team) and browsing the stats on the back. My favorite cards would go into hard plastic sheaves or the 3x3 protective sheets I'd put in my notebooks. Somewhere I still have my favorite notebook, with rookies of Ken Griffey Jr, Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire, Frank Thomas, and my personal favorite, Robin Ventura.

Josh and Dan will buy a pack occasionally, but have nowhere near the obsession this young nerd had. They spend time reading classic fiction - go figure. I still remember Robin Ventura's stat line from 1991 (.284 23 100). They must be missing out.

Posted by Davey at 10:29 AM | Comments (10)

Safeco and Seattle.

Posted by Davey at 02:40 PM | Comments (2)

Blog will have to wait till after this weekend.

Posted by Davey at 01:33 PM | Comments (1)

A list for Sky Cow Books

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

You don't have to watch The O.C. or listen to Death Cab For Cutie to see that the pervasive emotion of the new generation is what Walker Percy would call ennui: an empty dissatisfaction with the way things are without knowing exactly why. Cynicism and postmodernism go together like peanut butter and marshmallow fluff, but they make a rather unhealthy sandwich. The thing is, while Emo has only come into its own in the past decade or so, Generation Y-ers are not the first to experience ennui. The first epidemic seemed to sweep the intellectuals of the early 20th century. T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" (among other works) captured the spirit of modernism: shiny and new on the outside, but full of rotting hollow men on the inside.

But, as Joseph Pearce has observed in Literary Converts, out of this malaise, Grace saved a host of brilliant writers and poets. The grandfather of them all was G.K. Chesterton, whose irrepressible wit and Innocent Smith-like joy dumbfounded those modern artists who could think only in monochrome. His influence brought some of the 20th century's greatest novelists to the faith, mostly the Catholic faith (although men like C.S. Lewis and Eliot were content in high church Anglicanism).

For about forty years after Chesterton's death in 1936, there was a flood of incisive and brilliant novel-making. Even those novelists who resisted the Faith often had covert (and not so covert) struggles with God and His Church evidenced in their writings.

The following list is eight of my personal favorites out of this literary movement. They span almost one hundred years, two continents, but all are concerned with the same question: Is God the answer to the spiritual ennui we are all facing in this post-Christian world? Some give an exuberant Yes!; some can't find the hope to say so; some make you feel ridiculous for even asking such an obvious question. But they all see what the unbelieving world is missing, and they all point the way to the narrow and rocky road to salvation.

* * * * *

Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Arguably Waugh's most accomplished novel, Brideshead Revisited masquerades as a parable of upper-class vice and pre-war nostalgia. In the end, all the comforts are stripped away, and the reader is confronted with what Waugh saw as the center of the story: "the operation of divine grace" in the midst of a lackluster modern world. Plenty of fancy and humor of the driest sort. (#80 on the Modern Library list of top novels of the 20th century)

The Moviegoer - Walker Percy
Walker Percy indentifies many of the same symptoms of modernism in the American South that Waugh saw in post-war England: once the Faith is taken away, "ennui" sets in. Satirizing modern apathy, Percy shapes a surprisingly moving account of one young man who cannot find the faith or motivation to live in the modern world except in the nostalgia and pristine beauty of the silver screen. (#60 on the Modern Library list)

Brighton Rock - Graham Greene
The first of Graham Greene's novels dealing with the Catholic faith, Brighton Rock gives away Greene's silent shame of his own flirtation with apostasy. The antihero, Pinkie Brown, is an unstable teenage gangster whose hatred of the Church pushes him toward violent crime after violent crime, in the end leading to a final reckoning of faith and judgment. Greene seems to be drawing parallels throughout to Dostoevsky's Notes From the Underground.

A Handful of Dust - Evelyn Waugh
One of the more chilling satires of modernism. The story of a secular couple's apathetic response to a family tragedy and the emptiness of modern life. No one forgets the ending, which is simultaneously hilarious and chilling. (#34 on the Modern library List)

The Man Who Was Thursday - G.K. Chesterton
Chesterton's dizzying account of one poet's encounter with the chameleon-like figure, Sunday, who seems a little too wise and untamed for the modern world. Part mystery, part thriller, part fantasy, part comedy -- the reader won't quite have it figured out until the end. Which is just how Chesterton must have wanted it.

Wise Blood - Flannery O'Connor
O'Connor gives us an antihero, Hazel Motes, who founds the Church Without Christ. The grotesque at its most redemptive.

Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World - Walker Percy
Many years after The Moviegoer, Percy wrote about a protagonist (a descendant of Saint Thomas More) who feels suffocated by modernism, but can't quite figure out why. Set in the not-so-distant future, when the apocalypse is right around the corner, but no one seems to care.

The Picture of Dorian Grey - Oscar Wilde
Considering his reputation, including Oscar Wilde on this list might seem ironic. But God loves the prodigal. Wilde had an eleventh hour conversion to Catholicism after living almost five decades of debauchery. In The Picture of Dorian Grey - Wilde's only novel - it's impossible to miss the clues of Wilde's doomed fight against embracing the Faith.

Posted by Davey at 03:26 PM | Comments (0)

...I've been browsing my writings from years ago, back in the day when I used exclamation points (!!!). Talk about purple prose. I imagined I kept hearing clunking sounds in my head as successive sentences thudded to the ground under their own weight. (Note to self: must find them all and burn them with great solemnity).

...So hot.

...So Emily is five and now has a verbal tic which is alternately endearing and annoying, depending on one's level of patience: she has to say goodbye at least 6 times before actually letting you go. "Goodbye, Davey. I'll see you. I'll talk to you later. Goodbye, Davey, goodbye...." When I was six I had a blinking tic. Old home videos reminded of this - my eyelids shutter open and shut by the second, as regular as a Swiss timepiece. My tics have changed over the years. Now it's playing patterns on my fingers and throat-clearing. But I have largely the same interests and OCD habits now that I had in kindergarten (a frightening thought, really). Most of my obsessions were established in 1990, actually. My allegiance to the good guys who wear black, contra the family tradition of supporting a team which enojys being the biggest losers in baseball. I began writing that year, too, in a little green journal which I think I still have somewhere. Oh, and espionage. I think it was when I was five that I first began using my hordes of green army men to set up covert operations behind enemy lines. And I fell for my first redhead that year.

Posted by Davey at 10:35 AM | Comments (4)

Keeps calling me from Chicago. I miss the city.

But there are reasons to stay in a backwater hippie town like Moscow.

Posted by Davey at 04:07 PM | Comments (4)