I’m going to toss this up there quickly in the time between Kid’s awakening and our departure for a (routine) doctor’s appointment in a bit.
Please see the previous post on Advent resources – I was amazed that the OSV pamphlets are still in print and being sold.
Let’s digest:
Cooking: I don’t usually lead off with this, but there’s a reason – yesterday, I made these always good and dependable King Arthur Donut Muffins as a sort of dessert for a barbecue-laden lunch here for the (drum roll) Darwin Catholic family rolling through on their way from one place to another. It was a delight to meet the entire family in person!
Listening: Of course, much, much church music. Son #5 continues in his job as a weekend church organist at a small parish.
But there is other listening happening – Friday late morning we attended on of our Alabama Symphony Orchestra’s “Coffee Concerts” – basically a partial dress rehearsal for the weekend’s evening performances, put on for old people and schoolkids. We are both, so yeah, we fit right in.
Because of Mass schedules (7 pm Friday for All Saints, 6pm Saturday, Sunday vigil), we wouldn’t be able to attend the regular concerts, so this would do – it was crowd-pleasing material: Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite and Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances. Well-done as usual – and because they didn’t manage to put us on the list despite my reservation, we snagged orchestra seats instead of being put in the balcony with the kids.
Sunday afternoon – to the lovely and impressive Independent Presybterian Church for an organ recital by one of Notre-Dame-de-Paris’ organist Johann Vexo. It was great. The piece both of us enjoyed the most was this one – Felix Mendelssohn – Variations Sérieuses
Watching: Son has been watching the new Jack Ryan season. I watched the second episode of Silicon Valley – best part was the new HR person’s cool takedown of Gilfoyle:
Oh, you’re “that guy”.
What “guy” exactly?
The brooding, arrogant guy who refuses to take orders? Self-taught coder who looks down on anyone who’s taken a class. You’re probably an atheist or something more contrarian. You claim to be an anarcho-capitalist, but you work here and pay taxes. You’ve probably read half of Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, and it’s about 50/50 whether you own a snake.
Silicon Valley’s not perfect by any means – not even “great” – and the profanity is boringly over-the-top, but it’s sharp observations like this that keep me coming back…
Reading: Desperate for an actual book with pages and a cover, unable to get to the library, I went to the stacks downstairs and grabbed The Last Gentleman – by Walker Percy (whose parents were instrumental in founding, by the the way, the Presbyterian Church where the organ recital was held) – I realized I’ve never actually read it. So we’re in for that heartbreaking experience in which I read a page and then must put it down, humbled and provoked by the truth – wondering if I can ever produce anything even close:
New York is full of people from small towns who are quite content to live obscure lives in some out-of-the-way corner of the city. Here there is no one to keep track. Though such a person might have come from a long line of old settlers and a neighborhood rich in memories, now he chooses to live in a flat on 231st Street, pick up the paper and milk on the doorstep every morning, and speak to the elevator man. In Southern genealogies there is always mention of a cousin who went to live in New York in 1922 and not another word. One hears that people go to New York to seek their fortunes, but many go to seek just the opposite.
In his case, though, it was part of a family pattern. Over the years his family had turned ironical and lost its gift for action. It was an honorable and violent family, but gradually the violence had been deflected and turned inward. The great grandfather knew what was what and said so and acted accordingly and did not care what anyone thought. He even wore a pistol in a holster like a Western hero and once met the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in a barbershop and invited him then and there to shoot it out in the street. The next generation, the grandfather, seemed to know what was what but he was not really so sure. He was brave but he gave much thought to the business of being brave. He too would have shot it out with the Grand Wizard if only he could have made certain it was the thing to do. The father was a brave man too and he said he didn’t care what others thought, but he did care. More than anything else, he wished to act with honor and to be thought well of by other men. So living for him was a strain. He became ironical. For him it was not a small thing to walk down the street on an ordinary September morning. In the end he was killed by his own irony and sadness and by the strain of living out an ordinary day in a perfect dance of honor.
Critics (and I) would suggest that the last reference is a fictional allusion to Percy’s own father, who committed suicide in the attic of a house over the mountain from the Independent Presbyterian Church he helped found…