Close reading: Needless Alexandrines

Martyrdom of St. Lawrence, illumination on parchment, French, late 12th century. Wikimedia Commons.

I've never noticed this before, but apparently National Review runs a poem from time to time, mostly in the monastery garden behind the broken glass–topped old stones of the paywall I suppose, but sometimes it winds up visible to the profane in The Corner, where I noticed one today. The rubric is edited by Kathryn Jean Lopez, obviously, and I like to think of her, slightly envious of us atheists and Marxists and abortion supporters with our Katha Pollitt, explicitly looking for a figure of equivalent charisma on the right, a poetess of stature but also of more decorous opinions, preferably scanning and rhyming and staying away from some of these detestable innovations that have been brought on the scene by young whippersnappers like Miss Millay and Mr. cummings, not that there's anything wrong with being modern up to a point or even a little racy once in a while, but you'll never get to "Tears, idle tears" that way, will you?

Anyway, today's offering, by Jennifer Reeser, is a part-Petrarchan sonnet in its rhyme scheme, with a half-breed octave (half Italian, abba, and half Sicilian, abab), and the totally unexpected meter of iambic hexameter (not actual wounded-snake Alexandrines, which demand a caesura after the sixth syllable, but six-footers all the same, which is a pretty limp meter in English), and the poet handles them with a good deal of confidence and adequate syllable-counting, though to my ear she lands some of the stresses in pretty awkward places. Explaining it, on the other hand, is not that easy. Imma just go ahead and lay it out with some helpful interpretive glosses.

Happy National Review Year

St. Jean-Baptiste Vianney (1786-1859), curé d'Ars, who wrote: "We cannot dwell upon the conduct of the Jews, my dear people, without being struck with amazement. These very people had waited for God for four thousand years, they had prayed much because of the great desire they had to receive Him, and yet when He came, He could not find a single person to give Him the poorest lodging. The all-powerful God was obliged to make His dwelling with the animals. And yet, my dear people, I find in the conduct of the Jews, criminal as it was, not a subject for explanations, but a theme for the condemnation of the conduct of the majority of Christians. We can see that the Jews had formed an idea of their Redeemer which did not conform with the state of austerity in which He appeared. It seemed as if they could not persuade themselves that this could indeed be He who was to be their Saviour; St. Paul tells us very clearly that if the Jews had recognised Him as God, they would never have put Him to death. There is, then, some small excuse for the Jews [Well, that's very white of you, Father, as they say]. But what excuse can we make, my dear brethren, for the coldness and the contempt which we [i.e., Christians] show towards Jesus Christ?" 

In the Kathryn Jean Lopez interview technique, as I understand it, there is no actual interview; the subject emails her a list of prepared things she wants to say and then Lopez writes a set of questions for each, to make it look as if an interview had taken place. What I like to do (well, what I did once, anyway) is just print (some of) the questions without answers, and then wonder what drugs she's on.

Today's is from an interview with Kathleen Beckman, author of Praying for Priests: A Mission for the New Evangelization (Manchester, NH: Sophia Institute Press, 2014):

Cheap shot: Kathryn Jean

John Seven: The Saints Of Exhalation Aspire To Preserve The Breath Of Happy Children for The (Privatized) Good Of All!

Don't hold your breath, at least if you're a saint.

No earthly exaltation is important. The only exhalation that important is that of the saints--of Heaven #homilytweet pic.twitter.com/124HLzHniB

— Kathryn Jean Lopez (@kathrynlopez) August 22, 2015

For the rest of you kids, never mind.

Christmas Exceptionalism

Away from a manger. Nicolas Poussin, La Nourriture de Jupiter (1636-37). Wikimedia Commons.

"Biblical theologian" Scott Hahn, author of Joy to the World: How Christ's Coming Changed Everything (and Still Does) (2014), doing a book tour interview with Kathryn Jean Lopez at NRO in that curious style of hers, where she always seems to be working backwards, taking a prepared text and interpolating questions into it:

LOPEZ: Why is it important to notice that Jesus “doesn’t behave like a conventional hero”?

Cheap shots and bright sparks

Psychiatrist Dr. Keith Ablow explaining his support for presidential candidate Newt Gingrich a couple of years ago, in psychiatric terms.

Via Kilgore:

“I’m suspect,” Dr. Keith Ablow said Thursday on “Outnumbered” as the US men’s national team faced off against Germany. “I am suspect because, here’s the thing. Why, at a time when there are so many national and international issues of such prominence — I’m a little suspicious of yet another bread-and-circus routine. Let’s roll out the marijuana, pull back the laws, and get people even more crazy about yet another entertainment event.”

Yes, Dr. Ablow, you've discovered a fairly vast conspiracy here: in March 2003, State Senator Obama, realizing he might have a Benghazi scandal to deal with by the time he got to his second term as president, secretly sent emissaries to FIFA asking the [jump]

On a wing and a prayer breakfast

Former National Review Online editor acknowledges presidential truthfulness!

The President Told Us He Was Audacious
And he was not lying.

Namely, at the National Prayer Breakfast President Obama spoke out boldly and totally unexpectedly in favor of the rights of religious freedom as enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution!

Like he's not doing everything he can to force innocent nuns to let their holy money get dirty as it wanders into the pockets of their slutty employees, or not directly, because they can't actually stop them from spending that money on animal sacrifices and wooden dildos for their Satanic sabbaths if they want, but into the slutty employees' insurance policies, which would enable them to install one of those tiny abortion machines to guillotine tiny babies all day long up in their uteruses, at a much lower price than they would have to pay if their insurance didn't cover it. It's the nuns' money, and if religious freedom means anything at all it means those whores should pay top dollar for their filthy IUDs or else get a job in an atheist-run nursing home. It's what James Madison was all about.

Or maybe, you know, not. Maybe it isn't the nuns' money after all, in the first place. Maybe it's not a charitable gift to the women on the payroll but earned, equally whether it's in their paychecks or their benefits package, to be spent as they like and as their own religious beliefs permit, because they might have some, in fact, even though they may be fearfully uneducated and low-class in comparison to somebody like Kathryn Jean Lopez, whose compassion is so refined and special that it can only be applied to bishops and fetuses.

Via Shadow Mountain Baptist Church, Morgan Hill, CA.

Breaking: Talking Head Shows Up on Television

Lopez Discusses Obama’s Policies against the Catholic Church as He Preps to Meet Pope Francis

By NRO Staff

For reals: Kathryn Jean Lopez appears (briefly) on Fox News. Why is this headline so small?

Polar bear facepalm, via Paco Enterprises.

Cheap shots: Cries and whiskers

"Like a Surgeon"

Dana Loesch: 'Imagine if Madonna's name was Phil Robertson' http://t.co/h5nG14PPHy
— TwitchyTeam (@TwitchyTeam) January 18, 2014

And imagine if Dana Loesch's name was Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade. That would explain why she thinks a penis is indistinguishable from a vaginal probe wand.

And much much more below the fold!

Instaview

Via BumBumGerms.

Now that recreational marijuana use is legal in Colorado, it's time to do things like contemplating Kathryn Jean Lopez conducting an interview, here with the Instapundit Glenn Reynolds on the subject of his newly issued

Cheap shots and word rustlers

No squat teams in Paramus. In Hoboken, on the other hand...

Swat's that you say?

The terrifying public suicide of Richard Shoop at the Garden State Plaza on Monday wasn't funny, but I liked this glimpse of Kathryn Jean's inner life:

The squat teams and bergen county sherifs couldn't be gentler protectors in a situation like this #paramus
— Kathryn Jean Lopez (@kathrynlopez) November 5, 2013

Maybe Special Quiet Understanding And Tactics?

The War on Bros and much, much more below the fold...

Steyn for candidate!

Image apparently used by Hugh Hewitt, entitled "Mark Steyn after Dismissal". 

Mark, Marquess of Steyn, purveyor of the high Brideshead tone to the National Review, is the victim of an apparent punk campaign to draft him into running for the United States Senate from New Hampshire. There's a petition that has already gathered 208 signatures!

Although I think the Constitution suggests senators should not be Canadian citizens.

MS I'm a citizen of Canada, never been anything else. I don't believe in dual citizenship.

LF So if you ever require rescuing by the Canadian government, you'll deserve it?

MS I can assure you that if I'm ever calling the Canadian consulate in some godforsaken hell demanding that HMCS Toronto come and get me, it won't be because I've called five other embassies in the previous 20 minutes.

[The source of this interview, National Post, doesn't put dates on its stories, on the grounds, I suppose, that to their readers it's always news, but nothing online suggests he's changed his mind.]

Don't tell Kathryn Jean!

When he used to write for McLean's,  and made some efforts in the direction of the selfie T-shirt business. Via Creekside.

A recent example of the famously sophisticated Steyn wit, on the subject of the president's extravagant vacation:

If the President and Bo decide to take a dip, I do hope they’ve beefed up aquatic security by a few hundred extra Secret Submariners in case the waters off Masachusetts are menaced by the same testicle-eating fish currently terrorizing Sweden.

I hope his lordship is well protected too, since the creatures are just as likely to turn up in his New Hampshire bathtub.

Roomful of hails

Kathryn Jean Lopez has a fetching new picture with her NRO byline, and some outstanding prose:

I made the mistake of walking away from my computer after hitting “play.” All of a sudden, the room was filled with hails to . . . Satan.

I saw that video without walking away, and I can tell you that the hails did not fill the room. They could hardly even be guessed at except for the woman at the very end who said it distinctly into the camera. I'm not saying the filmers were lying, but Kathryn Jean is not exactly being truthful about her own experience.

Given that [Texas State Senator Wendy] Davis has become effectively a heroine of our slouch — if not plunge — toward a culture comfortable with infanticide denial, the scene was fitting, however, I pray, jarring.

She doesn't want to exaggerate by calling it a "plunge" so it's a "slouch". (The less than energetic diver slouched into the water; the stock market slouched on slightly unpleasant news.) The concept of a "culture comfortable with infanticide denial" seems odd—why [jump]

Titian's Danae, impregnated by Zeus in the guise of a shower of gold. Via SenseShaper.