Re: Silence

From Joel in the comments box below:

Homie! It's been two months! Where are you?

Good question. Facing the facts, I suppose. The chief of which are these. We have an almost-two-year-old toddler with developmental delays, to which difficulties she has recently added the quite age-appropriate Super Tantrums, with the interesting twist of preferring to bang her face savagely into the floor as she screams, resulting in bruises, cuts, and bloodied nose and lip. On the other end, a child in the throes of adolescence, who needs a surprising amount of parenting time for someone who so often just wants to be left alone in her room to sulk. And then the middle child--who I am striving not to neglect utterly, both emotionally and educationally, as the continuing daily drama unfolds with her two sisters.

To be frank, I no longer have time to blog. And haven't for some time, even when I was blogging regardless. A conversation in the confessional a few months back went essentially like this:

Her Opinionated Self: ... also, I've neglected my regular prayers, especially in the evenings...
Father Direct: Why?
HOS: Oh, you know, there's so much housework, and caring for the children, and all....
Fr. D: Can't your husband give you a little time in the evening?
HOS: Well truthfully he does, really he makes sure to give me at least half an hour to myself.
Fr. D: And you do what in that time?
HOS: Um ... I blog, sometimes? And I read other people's blogs ... and such ... you know.
Fr. D: Oh yes, I know. Looks like we've found some prayer time for you then, have we?

So. Actual prayer--not the kind silently offered on the fly, but with a quiet heart and settled mind, has been more frequent as blogging and blog-reading have been less so; and I'm reading more actual books, too. And spending more evening time with Eudoxus, with no computer screen diverting my attention. It's been nice.

If I had a 'real' job, the kind where they're required by law to give you a lunch break and a chance to go to the bathroom without someone flinging themselves against the door shrieking while you pee, I might squeeze in some blogging. But I don't.

Is this goodbye? I think so. I'm toying, however, with trading in the bloggage for a website: less of the fleeting thoughts of the moment, daily flung into the cyberpit, and more of a permanent edifice, added onto on occasion. Still focused on homeschooling, and Catholica, and Catholic homeschooling, and other things of interest, modeled perhaps on the late Gerard Serafin's Praise of Glory site, which grew continuously and wonderfully, forestlike. If, when, such a thing has been successfully planted and seems likely to grow, I will provide a link to it from here.

Thank you and goodnight.

Two Recent Quotes

... that sum up nicely the tenor and relative success of Offspring #1's homeschooling career:

1. "You know what's really amusing about Planck's Constant?"

2. "Punic, Peloponnesian, whatever."

I think she's not so much headed for the liberal arts.

Accurate Moments in Televised Religion (caution: spoilers)

A category that sprang to mind while re-watching Carnivale last night. These aren't the best moments necessarily, but after cringing nearly every time religious faith or practice, or just the ordinary lives of believers, is portrayed on television (or movies), it's wonderful when, every couple of years, you see a moment that makes you say "Aha--they got it."

1. Brother Justin Crowe, the Methodist minister in Carnivale. Not just that the writers had the creativity to make the demonic preacher neither fundamentalist/evangelical nor overwrought Catholic, but an ordinary Methodist revival preacher; but they got the historical details right, too. Methodism has changed over the last seventy-odd years, but the nitpicky details all seem to be correct. And they don't even mention the word "Methodist"; [I'm willing to be corrected on this point]; you have to figure out for yourself who in the 1930's would have a pulpit in the middle, wear a cassock, have a bishop, and do revival preaching. A wonderful job.

In fact, bonus points for the writers noticing that most churches do have an organizational structure, and if strange things start going on, the bishop (or whoever) is going to be paying a visit pretty promptly.

2. David Caruso's character, in the first season of NYPD Blue, confessing to his parish priest. This may be the first and last time I've ever seen Catholic confession on TV or film that wasn't in a little dark wooden box and behind a screen, with some startled and horrified priest, who clearly doesn't know the penitent from Adam, listening to it all. Caruso's Detective Kelly, despite not being portrayed as a religious zealot, actually knows his priest (shocker!), and confesses while the two are outdoors, in a way familiar to most American Catholics who went to confession in the '90's: somewhat casual but reverent, face-to-face, and actually sounding like a real confession rather than a cheap device for narrating the plot or making the priest or penitent seem weird or threatening.

(Unfortunately, fifteen years later, I've never seen another realistic confession on the screen. My favorite bad TV confession was Scully's hour-long stint in the box, as a framing device for that week's plot. A real priest would have said in the first two minutes, "So, do you have an actual sin to confess?" Or "If this is going be very long, would you please make an appointment? Mass starts in fifteen minutes and there are eight people in line after you.")

3. Andre Braugher's Detective Frank Pembleton in Homicide, upon discovering his clueless "spiritual but not religious" partner took Communion when he went to a wedding Mass:

Pembleton: You're not Catholic and you took communion?
Bayliss: Yeah. Is that wrong?
Pembleton (smiling): If my God wins, you're screwed.

Non-pious banter about religious practice among laypeople! Nary a devout nun nor earnest priest in sight!

4. X-Files snake-handlers vs. mainliners. "Signs and Wonders": Deep South snake-handling fire-and-brimstone preacher out of central casting, played against the tolerant, educated, mainline Protestant minister who is quietly despairing at the credulity and unsophistication of the local yokels. This doesn't really belong on a list of "most accurate" portrayals, except in the sense that the final twist shows that some writer actually paid attention to the idea that a certain kind of progressive Christian theology denies or finesses so much as to be anti-Christian, and that the fundie preacher's insistence that Christ "demands our very lives" is, in fact, the genuine Christian faith.

5. Carmela tells off Father Phil in The Sopranos. When everyone else whips up a "bad priest" character in seconds by making him some combination of (a) gay, (b) predatory, and (c) vow-breaking hypocrites, the Sopranos writers knock it out of the park with Carmela's epiphany of what's wrong with the (technically) chaste but spiritually immature Father Phil:

"I think that you like the whiff of sexuality that never goes anyplace.... I think you have this m.o. where you manipulate spiritually thirsty women. And I think a lot if it is tied up with food somehow as well as the sexual tension game."

Ouch. It hurts because we've all seen it, or some variant of it.

Any others?

"Ain't Nothing To Comment On"

Lone Star proud! Did you think that, in giving us the 2004 scandal that was the "Texas miracle," Houston explored the limits of our state's educational policy malfeasance? Or was that challenging standard definitively met and exceeded the next year, when the Texas Supreme Court had to strike down the state's blatantly unconstitutional system of school funding for the fourth time?

No, turns out we hadn't reached bottom yet, y'all. The Dallas Morning News reports that South Oak Cliff High in Dallas has plumbed the depths of educational disgrace, reinvigorated southern stereotypes, and set a new standard of shame for Texas schools, by officially instituting student cage fights as a combination disciplinary method and faculty spectator sport:

The principal and other staff members at South Oak Cliff High School were supposed to be breaking up fights. Instead, they sent troubled students into a steel utility cage in an athletic locker room to battle it out with bare fists and no head protection, records show.

...

Investigators found that security monitors routinely used "the cage" – a section of the boys basketball locker room barricaded by wire mesh and metal lockers – to force problem students to fight out their disputes.

In one incident documented by investigators, a security monitor tried to fight a student in the cage, but [former principal] Moten intervened and broke it up. In another incident, the report said, Moten told security staff to put two fighting students "in the cage and let 'em duke it out." According to the report, students told their teachers that they were "gonna be in the cage" over arguments with their peers.

Eudoxus thinks this might be something that could be implemented profitably in the graduate program.

We Know Where You Live

Dana has the full scoop on this report prepared by U. of Iowa students for state legislators on the subject of homeschooling, but I was struck by this anxious little paragraph at the end, on the difficulties of enforcing intrusive regulations within private citizens' homes:

Little data exists on how often homeschooling laws go unenforced.... Furthermore, many states have no way of knowing if the information given by homeschools is accurate. For example, in Iowa there is no way to know if the attendance records are being accurately kept.

My! Really? If only there were some way to figure out if those homeschooled kids were actually showing up. In their homes. Where they live.

I know in this economy state budgets are tight, but surely we can find a way to fund school investigators to go to every homeschooling family's residence and inspect the attendance records. After all, it's for the children.

UPDATE: pre-1985 children's books

Yesterday was our public library's yearly sale, at which they let the public buy, at unbelievably cheap prices, library discards (most of them in great condition) and books donated by the public. Many donations are of high quality; but the fact is that the public libraries simply don't want and can't store most of their donated materials.

This was an opportunity to see if the ban on pre-1985 children's materials had already been implemented, and the answer is: sort of.

Among the library discards, a few were pre-1985, and they were available on the shelves. I picked up a lovely out-of-print Carolyn Haywood, among other nice finds. Given that there were literally thousands of children's discards, it's not surprising that nobody was able to pick through them for publication date.

There were no donated children's materials available for sale, however. In the past, about a quarter to a third of the children's books were donated items: I've gotten some of the Offspringen's best books this way. There were still plenty of donated items shelved in non-children's areas (you can tell the donated items because they have no library markings), and a well-stocked "vintage books" section: but no donated children's books. Since there were certainly hundreds of children's books donated to the public library over the course of the year--the legislation banning the sale/distribution of pre-1985 children's books is quite recent, and only went into effect in February--I can't help wondering what happened to them all. The landfill, sadly, is the most likely option; the library can't afford to store unwanted materials in the hope that Congress might reconsider this ghastly and ill-advised legislation.

Firemen in Congress

The unabated progress of the overreaction-to-headlines CPSIA should sicken the heart of any lover of older children's books.

It’s hard to believe, but true: under a law Congress passed last year aimed at regulating hazards in children’s products, the federal government has now advised that children’s books published before 1985 should not be considered safe and may in many cases be unlawful to sell or distribute. Merchants, thrift stores, and booksellers may be at risk if they sell older volumes, or even give them away, without first subjecting them to testing—at prohibitive expense. Many used-book sellers, consignment stores, Goodwill outlets, and the like have accordingly begun to refuse new donations of pre-1985 volumes, yank existing ones off their shelves, and in some cases discard them en masse.

Surely you wouldn't endanger your children's minds, I mean bodies, by permitting a book published before 1985 to fall into their little hands. What was the year before that, when books suddenly qualified as hazardous to the young? It's almost as if Congress were aiming for symbolic significance.

Since the law became effective the very next day, there was no time to waste in putting this advice into practice. A commenter at Etsy, the large handicrafts and vintage-goods site, observed how things worked at one store:

I just came back from my local thrift store with tears in my eyes! I watched as boxes and boxes of children’s books were thrown into the garbage! Today was the deadline and I just can’t believe it! Every book they had on the shelves prior to 1985 was destroyed! I managed to grab a 1967 edition of “The Outsiders” from the top of the box, but so many!

I'm so glad we've already stocked our shelves with high-quality pre-1985 literature--much of it nearly certain never to be reprinted, as it will never again be popular enough in American culture to make reprinting cost-effective. The local public library is having a big sell-off this Saturday. We'll see if pre-1985 children's books are available, or if the book ban has already been implemented here.