The future is young — unless China says otherwise.
DC Comics has removed a piece of artwork from social media that was meant to promote a new Batman comic after Chinese critics claimed the artwork showed support for pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong.
The image by artist Rafael Grampa shows a version of Batwoman holding a Molotov cocktail in front of pink lettering that says: “The future is young.”
Saturday, November 30, 2019
I Wonder What the American Version of this Poll Would Reveal
Three quarters of young Britons have never heard of Mozart while one in five think Bach is still alive, poll reveals
In the U.S. version, nearly all respondents would ask "Who's Mozart?" followed by, "Who's Botch ?"
In the U.S. version, nearly all respondents would ask "Who's Mozart?" followed by, "Who's Botch ?"
Friday, November 29, 2019
Not Just in Narnia
The Prophetic C.S. Lewis
Lewis cited an old theological question: “It has sometimes been asked whether God commands certain things because they are right, or whether certain things are right because God commands them. With Hooker [Richard Hooker, the Anglican theologian], and against Dr. [Samuel] Johnson, I emphatically embrace the first alternative. The second might lead to the abominable conclusion … that charity is good only because God arbitrarily commanded it — that He might equally well have commanded us to hate Him and one another and that hatred would then have been right.” It was dangerous to believe that sheer will, even God’s will, can be the ultimate source of right and wrong.
Sorry, But We Don't Need Any More White Saviors
Our people have been ill-served by politicians for as long as that elite class has plagued American culture. There is absolutely nothing this gesture does for those of us who live in the 21st century.
How about you do something about health insurance costs, eh? That was something else you and yours "fixed".
Of course, that would require actual work and intelligence, whereas pandering to tribal Americans is so much simpler. Also, this doesn't atone for the fake Indian routine that you relied upon for your employment and wherewithal.
Wednesday, November 27, 2019
Ah, Thanksgiving. Another Recipe.
As noted in yesterday's post, I'm not a big fan of turkey. I don't mind it in a deli sandwich, in fact I used to enjoy one planted in a kaiser with homemade mayo and plenty of freshly ground pepper that was constructed by a now-defunct deli in Grand Central. That, and a bag of cheese waffles, used to be the highlight of my weekly Friday journey from the city to Fairfield County. However, I think the full bird is too much fuss to cook and too bland a meal around which to build a holiday. It's telling when the stuffing is usually far superior, unless some lunatic puts water chestnuts in it.
When I was growing up with the Indians on the frontier, we would enjoy the annual Thanksgiving deer hunt and savor the fresh meat from our kills as our dinner. [Although Grandma always had a half-dozen of Grandpa's chickens on reserve in case we came home without a trophy.] It's best I not share that info with the more genteel folk with whom I spend my current days, though.
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| The cousins with our Thanksgiving entree |
In addition to our traditional fish tacos, we've also enjoyed steamed lobster and lobster pie a few times over the years, especially on those lucky occasions when we've been able to spend a couple of days on the shoreline. A couple of years ago, having just returned from Australia, we brought with us the recipe for the single most glorious sandwich ever invented. My only regret is that one cannot buy either Carlton Draught or Victoria Bitter in the United States, as those two beers complement it perfectly. [Foster's is not Australian beer; it's canned in Pittsburgh.]
Here's the recipe, and be prepared to open your mind to new gastronomic possibilities.
Behold, Crocodile Bob's Aussie Works Burger:
Ingredients [serves four]:
1 pound ground beef
1 large onion, sliced
4 eggs
4 slices Canadian bacon
4 pineapple rings
4 slices Cheddar cheese
1 (8.25 ounce) can sliced beets, drained
4 slices tomato
4 lettuce leaves
4 Kaiser rolls, split
ketchup (optional)
yellow mustard (optional)
dill pickle relish (optional)
mayonnaise (optional)
Directions:
Preheat an outdoor grill for high heat.
When the grill is ready, lightly oil the grilling surface.
Form the ground beef into four patties, and grill for 5 minutes per side, or until cooked through.
Meanwhile, melt butter in a large skillet over medium heat.
Add onions, and fry until soft.
Remove the onions from the skillet, and crack the eggs in the same skillet over medium heat.
Cook until the yolks are solid, turning over once.
Remove eggs, and set aside.
Place the Canadian bacon in the same skillet, and fry until toasted.
Remove the bacon, and turn the heat to high.
Quickly fry the pineapple rings in the bacon drippings just until browned on each side.
Assembly:
Set bottom of kaiser roll on a plate,
1. top with burger,
2. a slice of cheese,
3. a slice of Canadian bacon,
4. one fried egg,
5. fried onions,
6. a slice of beet,
7. a slice of pineapple,
8. a slice of tomato,
9. and a leaf of lettuce.
Serve to those shocked with wonder.
Since this year my wife and I are on our own for Thanksgiving, a first in our marriage, we're going to spend the day digesting this 920 calorie delight by raking some leaves and watching any team but the Cleveland Browns play football.
The staff of The Coracle will take tomorrow off.
A Thanksgiving Recipe, Part One
Since people ask me what we do for Thanksgiving [I know you're just being polite, but be careful what you ask for], there is a particular dish that I like to prepare to either delight or horrify those with whom we share the holiday. [If you're looking for a turkey recipe, you've come to the wrong place. We never eat turkey at Thanksgiving. What are we, a buncha Congregationalists?] The recipe and preparation instructions follow:
Surf City Curbside Fish Tacos
Ingredients:
1 lb of fresh swordfish steak
Salt and pepper
Olive oil
1 doz corn tortillas
Vegetable oil or butter (optional, depending on how you heat your tortillas)
Lime Mango sauce [see instructions]
1 ripe Avocado
Cabbage or iceberg lettuce
Cider vinegar
Salt
Prepare the sauce. This can be done either the simple or the complex way. The simple way is as follows:
1. Go to Stop and Shop
2. Buy some lime mango sauce in aisle 6
You may use it as a marinade for the fish and then, with the addition of some sour cream, use the remainder as the sauce for the finished dish. Naturally, don't use the sauce in which the fish has been marinating for the presentation sauce. At least, that's what Jenni always tells me. What she doesn't know won't hurt her.
The more complex way is to do the following:
Place two ripe, peeled and pitted mangoes and some lime juice [two limes or equivalent] into a food processor and blend until pureed. If the sauce is too thick, add a tablespoon or two of cold water. Stir in one diced jalapeno with seeds and skin removed [unless you like four-alarm sauce, like I do, in which case toss the seeds and skin into the whole shebang] and there you go. Save it until taco construction.
Prepare the cabbage and avocado. Thinly slice the cabbage and put it in a small serving bowl, sprinkle it with cider vinegar (about a tablespoon) and salt (about a teaspoon). Mix in the vinegar and salt. Peel the avocado and remove seed. Chop and reserve for later.
Heat the tortillas. There are two ways of doing this.
1. Simply heat them in the microwave for 20-25 seconds on high heat, on top of a napkin or paper towel to absorb the moisture that is released.
2. Or heat a cast iron skillet to medium heat. Add a teaspoon of oil to the pan or spread a half a teaspoon of butter on one side of one tortilla. Place tortilla in the pan (butter side down if you are using butter). As the tortilla sizzles, flip the tortilla with a spatula so that the other side gets some of the oil or butter from the pan. Continue to flip every 10-30 seconds until the tortillas begins to develop air pockets, after about a minute. You can always skip the butter or oil.
Remove the tortilla from the pan and place it folded on a plate. If the pan is large enough you can prepare two or more tortillas at once. Continue until all the tortillas (estimate 3 per person) are cooked. Set aside.
Cook the fish. Soak the fish fillets in cold water for at least one minute. Pat dry with a paper towel. Heat a large stick-free skillet to medium high heat. Add a couple of teaspoons of olive oil to the skillet. Place fish on skillet. Cooking time depends on the thickness of the fillets. A thin fillet may take only one minute on each side to cook. A thicker fillet may take a couple of minutes. Fish should be still barely translucent when cooked. Break off a piece and test if you are not sure, or give it to your cat and see what he does with it. Do not overcook the fish. When done, remove the fish from the pan to a separate plate. Sprinkle with salt and pepper to taste.
Place the plate of tortillas, fish, the sauce, cabbage, and avocados on the table and let everyone assemble their own. You go to a separate room where it's quiet and watch a football game. Preferably, Ohio State, since Princeton's season is over. Or maybe stream Endless Summer and look at photos from Hawaii, Fiji, and Australia.
Tuesday, November 26, 2019
Sooth
Given all this – given the undeniable momentum and power of movements towards fairness and righteousness and equality, given the ubiquity of this movement in every single aspect and institution of this city, how is it possible that it still feels like such an awful, intolerant, racist, sexist, Islamophobic, homophobic, anti-indigenous (sorry if I missed anyone) hell hole of a city?Please read the whole essay. It's remarkable.
The answer to that is actually pretty simple. The misery, the injustice, doesn’t exist in spite of all the social justice activism, it exists because of it. And truthfully, as my own subtext from the preceding paragraphs indicates, it doesn’t actually exist at all.
Monday, November 25, 2019
An Obituary of Note
Fiery theater, film critic John Simon dies at 94
I was acquainted with him through a mutual friend. Personally, I always got along with him. Besides being a critic, he was a brilliant scholar of comparative literature.
I was acquainted with him through a mutual friend. Personally, I always got along with him. Besides being a critic, he was a brilliant scholar of comparative literature.
Neo-Marxism is an Ideology for Puzzlewits
This is what art appreciation has come to: a PC prism through which a painting, a work of literature or even a popular song must be scrutinized for racism, sexism, gender bias or just plain hurt feelings.
New York museums haven’t banned anything yet. But look out: Metropolitan Museum of Art director Max Hollein told The New York Times that, “Art cannot solely be perceived in regard to its beauty and craftsmanship. You also have to evaluate it in light of its political messages.”
New York museums haven’t banned anything yet. But look out: Metropolitan Museum of Art director Max Hollein told The New York Times that, “Art cannot solely be perceived in regard to its beauty and craftsmanship. You also have to evaluate it in light of its political messages.”
Sunday, November 24, 2019
A Pungent Observation
Glaciers have been diminishing for the last 12,000 years, so it must be the fault of...(spins Wheel of Blame)...CAPITALISM!
About That Yale vs. Harvard Halftime Protest
"Activism is a way for useless people to feel important....” -Thomas Sowell
Saturday, November 23, 2019
Friday, November 22, 2019
John Updike
Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home,
wondering why the hell you went.
With that statement, John Updike, at the time a well-known novelist and short story writer, very much the toast of the Eastern literary establishment, parted the curtain and took his position behind the podium at the center of the stage. For an hour or so he read from his collected works, answered questions from a crowd of mostly students of our Jesuit university, and offered piquant observations on contemporary life, human relations, and God. As a graduate student, and a member of the "lecture committee" that arranged his appearance, I was pleased at the general response and delighted to meet him
Then, rather quietly, he asked if someone might drive him to the hospital as he thought his appendix had just burst. He was almost right about that, as it turns out; it was certainly just about to; and, as loyal readers of The Coracle may have guessed, given my past history of being in cars with racing drivers, bishops, academics, and musicians, I was the guy who drove him to the emergency room.
If I were to write an autobiography, I think I would entitle it Karma's Chauffeur.
John Updike was something that is virtually non-existent in our flat, superficial, and spiritually retarded age: a man of letters who was also a person of the spirit. How he got to that place of metaphysical realization, and the guides whom he used to nurture it, should be of interest to those charting a spiritual course through our post-Christian reality, displaying what literature once was and might be again.
Updike was born in middle class comfort to educated and capable parents. As an only child, he was indulged, particularly by his mother, a writer of limited success but, apparently, boundless energy who instilled a love of words, sentences, and paragraphs in her son. Even her typewriter and paper became for Updike symbols of comfort. Graduating as valedictorian from his Berks County, Pennsylvania high school and earning a degree in English at Harvard, Updike starting writing for the Harvard Lampoon, a periodical he served as editor, and, upon graduation, for The New Yorker.
Honing his style, and making important contacts in the publishing world, Updike drew from contemporary voices in literature such as Salinger, Cheever, and Nabokov, and was grounded in the classics. Almost on schedule, with the advent of the 1960's, he found himself in the midst of a profound spiritual crisis. While he had been raised a Christian [or, as a Congregationalist, close enough] and had maintained the ethos of the faith, like many others of the era he found traditional spirituality lacking for the Atomic Age. It was then that he turned for direction and some sense of intellectual solace to the works of the theologians Karl Barth and Soren Kierkegaard. That brought a greater, and much more resonant, quality to his prose.
As Barth and Kierkegaard both stressed God at work in the here-and-now, with the sheer impossibility of ever completely knowing God, and that such attempts at knowledge would be thwarted if one used only the tools of intellect and logic, Updike sought to create a character who would be both typical of the towns in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts that he knew, yet evocative of the spiritual quest as it was encountered in the second half of the 20th century. Thus was born Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, former high school athlete, suburban husband and father, and Toyota dealer. Through four novels, from Rabbit, Run in 1960 to 1990's Rabbit at Rest, Angstrom comes to represent the experience of the middle-class Protestant through the Camelot of the Kennedy's to the Reagan presidency, all the while taking into account the remarkable changes in culture, mores, and world view.
There were other characters, of course, such as the rebellious teenage store clerk in "A & P" and the blocked writer, Henry Bech, the protagonist in a trilogy of novels. [A note of interest, mainly to me: Once, when speaking with my wife's cousin who, like my wife, had attended a women's college in the South, she recounted the time that Updike came to address the literary society in the college's refined and elegant sitting room. I had to smile as not only did the cousin remember Updike's joy at being surrounded by lovely and gracious Southern women, but he also wrote a barely fictionalized scene of the same in one of the Bech novels, with his writer-hero realizing the same delight at a fictional college.]
Beyond Rabbit and Bech, though, the recurring character in an Updike novel is always some representative of 20th century standards, losing his or her way in the maze of conflicting ethics, attempting to find a true sense of love and purpose in the midst of existential chaos. He made this philosophical/theological situation so familiar that it is nearly a cliche, even aped by nostalgic television shows like "Mad Men".
That night, in the car on the way to the hospital, we got to speaking of saints like Teresa and Updike became quite jolly thinking what it would be like for a 20th century Lutheran or Congregational pastor to suddenly announce to his congregation that he was having religious visions, hearing divine voices, and occasionally levitating. His temperature was a little high, I guess. We both laughed at what the reaction of congregations and bishops might be. The only difference from the time of St. Teresa was that the clergy-person would be thought schizophrenic rather than demonically possessed.
"Of course, an Episcopalian would be defrocked, as that would be tantamount to cheating on a golf score."
Updike would continue to write at his self-imposed schedule of one book a year, a daunting expectation for any writer, but certainly testimony to how much he enjoyed creating characters and placing them in ordinary, and sometimes ordinarily remarkable, circumstances. I attempted to count the number of published works that Updike produced, from novels and short stories to poetry and non-fiction appreciations, but stopped when I realized that his non-fiction alone accounted for six bound collections. Suffice it to say, he was a writer of broad ability and deep talent.
He died in 2009 at the age of 76, succumbing to the long-term effects of cigarette smoking. According to one of his nurses, he carried a bemused expression with him even past the point of mortality. More than anything else, that bemusement captures the attitude and experience of a post-modern Christian.
Thursday, November 21, 2019
Thursday's Place: Ashmolean Museum
One of the fantasies of my childhood was to be locked in a museum overnight. All by myself, alone with the treasures collected, and able to touch anything I wanted without being scolded by an officious guard. I would sometimes wonder if the sculptures spoke when no one was around. When I was slightly older, I adjusted my conceit to imagining what it would be like to be a cat burglar released on my own to wander the halls of collected antiquities and help myself.
A form of these fantasies almost came true in my sixteenth year when I visited the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford very late one weekday afternoon and, as I was studying some shard of ancient lore, I was suddenly aware that, after hearing what seemed to be the sound of stout doors being closed and locked, the lights were being turned off. I had a moment of hesitation. Should I make myself known as quickly as possible to the security staff, or should I try to hide behind a stray mummy and spend the night in fulfillment of my childhood fantasy?
I chose the former, unfortunately, since I didn’t fancy spending jail time at the pleasure of Her Majesty. However, in my dotage, I occasionally regret that decision.
The object of my distraction was The Alfred Jewel, a small enameled piece that dates to circa 800 A.D. and may have served as the head-stock to some form of stick or practical tool. According to its inscription, it was commissioned by King Alfred the Great himself. As often happens with objects of antiquity, it was discovered accidentally. In this case, 800 years later by a laborer while plowing his squire’s field.
While that may be the museum’s most popular display, one that has inspired and encouraged generations of amateur archaeologists, these days armed with increasingly effective metal detectors, it is housed with other works of various quality and importance, rendered by some of the great characters in English history.
Among its treasured items are the following, but I'm particularly covetous of Guy Fawkes' lantern and an ewer fashioned from lapis lazuli.
Descending from a 17th century nobleman's "cabinet of curiosities", the Ashmolean Museum rests on a pleasant street near Balliol and St. John's Colleges and within a skip from Blackfriars, a place where Evensong is sung most days for Vespers. The original collection included items brought back to England by travelers, explorers, natural philosophers, and various brigands. Eventually, the collection grew so that new digs were to be found in the 1840's, when the cabinet became a proper museum, named for its original owner, patron, and notorious alchemist, Elias Ashmole.
Of particular note, the Ashmolean once had the stuffed remains of the last European dodo. Unfortunately, it was consumed by moths sometime in the 1750's. However, it's skull is still on display. Just ask for "The Oxford Dodo".
The museum continues to expand and offers so many courses hosted by lecturers from the University in so many topics that the suffix, "late of the Ashmolean", is regarded as a bit of a cliche. Still, it has inspired a rich variety of people, from students to clergy to housewives and husbands, and not just those with an interest in antiquities. As well it should, since one of its laborers in the early part of the 20th century, an undergrad from St. John's, known as Ned Lawrence, would become yet another of its benefactors after he took on the suffix, "of Arabia".
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| Lawrence's Arabic apparel, which is also to be found in the Ashmolean |
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