New Article by Yours Truly
Category: Writing and Poetry

I visit the Windy City Pulp and Paper Convention. Enjoy.

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Whoremonger
Category: Writing and Poetry

I had an article published in the Chicago Reader wherein I interviewed author Karen Abbott about her new book, Sin and the Second City and wrote a little bit about the history of the Everleigh Club, the ritziest and most exclusive whorehouse in turn of the century Chicago. If you want to read the original, longer version, go here.

Currently listening : Scott Joplin: The Complete Rags, Marches, Waltzes & Songs By Mac Darden Release date: 04 May, 2004

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Chemicals Around My Heart
Current mood: weird
Category: Blogging

Currently listening : Our Endless Numbered Days By Iron & Wine Release date: 23 March, 2004

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Hello Out There

Hi all,

I'd like to get an idea of the usefulness of posting anything to my MySpace blog. Who's reading this right now? Say howdy in the comments and let me know if you want to see more of my writing here, or if I should just post links to my site and LiveJournal blog. Otherwise, I think I'm just using this place to park the mrdankelly brand.

Thanks!

Dan

Currently listening : Dummy By Portishead Release date: 17 October, 1994

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Book Hell!
Category: Religion and Philosophy

I wrote this for Donna Kossy's zine Book Happy. Oddly enough, I worked on it during a long and agonizing week of jury duty for a murder trial. Book Happy covers all sorts of strange and odd books. For more information, see the links below.

I swear that I write about more than Roman Catholicism.


"Perhaps at this moment, seven o'clock in the evening, a child is just going into Hell. To-morrow evening at seven o'clock, go and knock at the gates of Hell, and ask what the child is doing. The devils will go and look. Then they will come back again and say, the child is burning! Go in a week and ask what the child is doing; you will get the same answer—it is burning! Go in a year and ask; the same answer comes —it is burning! Go in a million of years and ask the same question; the answer is just the same —it is burning! So, if you go for ever and ever, you will always get the same answer —it is burning in the fire!"

"The Sight of Hell," Rev. John Furniss, C.S.S.R.

After reading Dant..'s Divine Comedy through and through, a friend of mine—a non-Christian—told me that he'd rather spend eternity in Inferno than Paradiso.

"Why?" I asked him.

"Because nothing ever happens in Heaven," he said, echoing centuries of Divine Comedy readers.

A flip answer to the true believer, it reveals the genius of Hell. Hell has always seemed more real and vivid than heaven, and thus its threat carries more weight than a promise of perpetual bliss. No one can conceive of eternal satisfaction, but everyone can imagine stubbing their toe forever.

Roman Catholic Hell is the best of all Christian Hells. Fundamentalist Protestantism favors the Lake of Fire, an oceanic expanse of flame into which lost souls are given the heave-ho and left to burn in till the end of days and beyond. Catholic Hell, conversely, with no little help from Dant.., is an astonishingly plastic cosmos with an entertaining assortment of ironical punishments performed with witty elan by a cast of demons and devils. From this, an amazing oral tradition has resulted, borne by storytellers in habits and cassocks. If you weren't raised Catholic, I pity you. You missed out on many a hair-raising yarn told by wizened Polish peasant women in penguin garb. At St. Damian's grade school, we didn't gather around campfires to hear ghost stories, we gathered around nuns to hear Hell Lore.

Disappointingly, like most folkways, Hell Lore stands in danger of dying out. Older Catholics can recall many hellish tales told them by addled Jesuits and Franciscans, while those in their 30s (of which the author is one) were lucky to have had at least one twisted sister holdover from the old days. As teaching grew more scientific, and society tried harder to prevent psychotics from teaching children, Hell Lore began dying out. Fortunately, many examples are preserved in book form.

The best literary example of Hell Lore appears in James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In one chapter, Steven Daedalus' priest spouts the following.

"They lie in exterior darkness. For, remember, the fire of Hell gives forth no light. As, at the command of God, the fire of the Babylonian furnace lost its heat but not its light, so, at the command of God, the fire of Hell, while retaining the intensity of its heat, burns eternally in darkness. It is a never ending storm of darkness, dark flames and dark smoke of burning brimstone, amid which the bodies are heaped one upon another without even a glimpse of air...
The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful stench... the bodies of the damned themselves exhale such a pestilential odour that, as Saint Bonaventure says, one of them alone would suffice to infect the whole world... Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jelly-like mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition. And then imagine this sickening stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. Imagine all this, and you will have some idea of the horror of the stench of Hell.

But this stench is not, horrible though it is, the greatest physical torment to which the damned are subjected... the lake of fire in Hell is boundless, shoreless and bottomless. ...The blood seethes and boils in the veins, the brains are boiling in the skull, the heart in the breast glowing and bursting, the bowels a red-hot mass of burning pulp, the tender eyes flaming like molten balls..."

And so on. One imagines the older, earthier Joyce relishing his reenactment of a brimstone-spouting priest.

Brilliant as he was, in this instance Joyce was derivative if not lightly plagiaristic. While he undoubtedly heard a hellish folktale or two in Dublin, he likely came under the indirect influence of the very disturbing Rev. John Furniss.

A moderately notable 19th Century Irish-English priest, Fr. John Furniss was born in 1809, died in 1865, and did quite well in-between as a parish priest and minister to parentless waifs. "Suffer the little children to come unto me," was Furniss' proffered scripture. He could have shaved off the last four words. Furniss indeed took care of his orphans, but he was no cuddly huggy-bear. The aptly named Furniss loved to preach damnation to the kidlings, always leaving them crying in the pews. Furniss went on to define religious education for a generation of Irish children under his tutelage, which goes far in explaining Daedulus and Joyce's own educations. "Nothing so disgusted children as monotony," quoth Fr. Furniss. He fought short attention spans with rhapsodized rosary readings, terse sermons, and napalm-spraying descriptions of what awaited bad little boys and girls.

The best of Furniss' diatribes are collected in an 1880 anthology titled Tracts for Spiritual Reading Designed for First Communions, Retreats, Missions, & etc. (P.J. Kenedy, Excelsior Catholic Publishing House). Most of the tracts provide accounts of worthy saints or simple fables about avoiding the dangers of drink, dance, carnal relations, and Irish wakes. Other tales are sugary glurge about hardhearted atheist parents who crack as easily as Waterford crystal upon spying their saintly son or daughter fondling a rosary on their behalf. Melancholia tinges other tales, usually involving young sinners ready to join the choir invisible but too foolish to say confession or take communion until it is far too late. For good measure, several flaming ghosts escape from Hell, scare the crap out of the living, whine about how awful it is to live in Hell and how stupid they were to sin, before leaving simmering hand and footprints on the furniture or the hauntee's body. For pure sick genius though, nothing beats Furniss' most unforgettable tract, "The Sight of Hell." Page after page, children are burned, boiled, bludgeoned, skewered, sauteed, pithed, and mutilated. Suffer the little children? Oh yes, indeed they suffer.

"XXIV. The Dungeons of Hell.

The First Dungeon—A Dress of Fire

Job xxxviii. Are not thy garments hot? Come into this room. You see it is very small. But see, in the midst of it there is a girl, perhaps about eighteen years old. What a terrible dress she has on — her dress is made of fire. On her head she wears a bonnet of fire. It is pressed down close all over her head; it burns her head; it burns into the skin; it scorches the bone of the skull and makes it smoke. The red hot fiery heat goes into the brain and melts it... You do not, perhaps, like a headache. Think what a headache that girl must have. But see more. She is wrapped up in flames, for her frock is fire. If she were on earth she would be burnt to a cinder in a moment. But she is in Hell, where fire burns everything, but burns nothing away. There she stands burning and scorched; there she will stand for ever burning and scorched! She counts with her fingers the moments as they pass away slowly, for each moment seems to her like a hundred years. As she counts the moments she remembers that she will have to count them for ever and ever."



XXVI. The Third Dungeon.
The Red Hot Floor

Look into this room. What a dreadful place it is! The roof is red hot; the floor is like a thick sheet of red hot iron. See, on the middle of that red hot floor stands a girl. She looks about sixteen years old. Her feet are bare, she has neither shoes nor stockings on her feet; her bare feet stand on the red hot burning floor. The door of this room has never been opened before since she first set her foot on the red hot floor. Now she sees that the door is opening. She rushes forward. She has gone down on her knees on the red hot floor. Listen, she speaks! She says; "I have been standing with my feet on this red hot floor for years. Day and night my only standing place has been this red hot floor. Sleep never came on me for a moment, that I might forget this horrible burning floor. Look," she says, "at my burnt and bleeding feet. Let me go off this burning floor for one moment, only for one single, short moment. Oh, that in the endless eternity of years, I might forget the pain only for one single,short moment." The devil answers her question: "Do you ask," he says, "for a moment, for one moment to forget your pain. No, not for one single moment during the never-ending eternity of years shall you ever leave this red hot floor!"



XXVII. The Fourth Dungeon.
The Boiling Kettle

...Look into this little prison. In the middle of it there is a boy, a young man. He is silent; despair is on him. He stands straight up. His eyes are burning like two burning coals. Two long flames come out of his ears. His breathing is difficult. Sometimes he opens his mouth and breath of blazing fire rolls out of it. But listen! There is a sound just like that of a kettle boiling. Is it really a kettle which is boiling? No; then what is it? Hear what it is. The blood is boiling in the scalded veins of that boy. The brain is boiling and bubbling in his head. The marrow is boiling in his bones! Ask him, put the question to him, why is he thus tormented? His answer is, that when he was alive, his blood boiled to do very wicked things, and he did them, and it was for that he went to dancing-houses, public-houses, and theatres. Ask him, does he think the punishment greater than he deserves? "No," he says, "my punishment is not greater than I deserve, it is just. I knew it not so well on earth, but I know now that it is just. There is a just and a terrible God. He is terrible to sinners in Hell—but He is just!""



"XXVIII. The Fifth Dungeon.
The Red Hot Oven

Ps. xx. Thou shalt make him as an oven of fire in the time of thy anger. You are going to see again the child about which you read in the Terrible Judgement, that it was condemned to Hell. See! It is a pitiful sight. The little child is in this red hot oven. Hear how it screams to come out. See how it turns and twists itself about in the fire. It beats its head against the roof of the oven. It stamps its little feet on the floor of the oven. You can see on the face of this little child what you see on the faces of all in Hell— despair, desperate and horrible!... This child committed very bad mortal sins, knowing well the harm of what it was doing, and knowing that Hell would be the punishment. God was very good to this child. Very likely God saw that this child would get worse and worse, and would never repent, and so it would have to be punished much more in Hell. So God, in His mercy, called it out of the world in its early childhood."

We might hesitate before applying today's mores and calling Fr. Furniss a child-hater. He was a man of his time, his concern for the tyke's immortal souls outweighing any worries about mental scarification. Hell was as real as England for Furniss, and he used every means at his diposal to warn his charges. Like many a bad idea, it made perfect sense at the time.

Upon consideration, however, the annoying practice of logic steps in. If Hell is so inescapable, why does Furniss know so much about what goes on there? Naming unnameable horrors and charting the unseen world for scoffers and unbelievers isn't easy. Furniss had no photographs, filmstrips, or videos of Hell to show his kids every Friday, nor could he conduct a Hell Career Day, inviting scorched witnesses, escaped from eternal conflagration by their teeth's skin, to "rap" with the kids. The Torah and Christian Bible make oblique references to afterlife fire, the parable of Dives and Lazarus (Luke 16:22-24) the only portrayal identifiable as Hell Lore, (evil rich man Dives and good leper Lazarus die; Question: Who ends up in Heaven and who writhes in the Devil's barbecue pit?). Furniss, and as we see below, Fr. F. X. Schouppe, do make reference to Good Book passages, particularly Dives/Lazarus and the less quoted Numbers 16:25-35 (Moses commands the ground to open up and consume rebellious Levites Korah, Dathan, and Abiram—from which the idea of Hell at the center of the earth sprang), but these don't approach the detailed field reports of Furniss and Schouppe. So, from whence does Catholic Hell lore emerge?

Furniss, Schouppe, and their fellow nuns and priest worked from a loose tradition of visionary saint histories. If St. Whoozit saw it during a a 30-day fast, it was so. Thus was Catholic belief in perdition fueled for centuries. This is like accepting the decisions of the prosecution's expert witnesses. They might be right, and they swear they are, but remember who's signing their checks.

Crazed saint visions suit the true-believers reading through Tan Books and Publishing's catalog. When Vatican II removed the Latin mass, allowed meat-full Fridays and handshakes of peace, and, by extension, permitted the abomination of the folk guitar mass, they downplayed the hellfire and brimstone to draw back lapsed Catholics. Many Catholics flocked to the new Jesus Wuvs You Church. Others left in a huff, preferring the cold masochistic pleasures of hardcore Romanism.

Tan Books, like the pittance of Latin Mass churches still around, strives to meet this meager demand. As Jack Chick is to Fundy Protestantism, so Tan is to Fundy Catholicism. Tan's catalog contains mostly reactive polemics, for or against predictable issues. Additionally, the Virgin Mary has a vanity press in Tan, the original Madonna receiving as much ink as her pop star namesake. Elsewhere, in other publications, vengeful zygotes haunt their mothers from beyond the grave, frightfully beseeching them, "Mommy, why did you kill meee!?!"

Tan was founded by Mr. Thomas A. Nelson in 1967, who gave his initials to the company. "After studying politics and world events," according to the Tan site (www.tanbooks.com), Mr. Nelson, determined that Catholicism was the only way to change the world. Turning to his Jesus cookie-eating roots, the 30-year-old Nelson started Tan on October 13, 1967—50 years after Our Lady's Miracle of the Sun at Fatima according to Tan propaganda—in his parents' basement. Nelson gradually restored the works of defunct Catholic publishers, which goes a long way toward explaining the hoariness of the books' prose. Tan also reissues works and items of inspiration by B-list saints like St. Louis De Montfort, St. Alphonsus Liguori, and others. Mr. Nelson puts the final seal of approval on all Tan books, most of which already possess the official Vatican imprimaturs of long-dead Catholic censors.

Tan's books are stripped-down, square-bound monstrosities/masterpieces. Some are direct scans from century-old books, grainy specks showing the foxing and moldering of the original pages. The cover art is amateurish, though a few achieve a beautifully frightening starkness. The designer of the cover of Purgatory Explained by the Lives and Legends of the Saints has a schoolgirl crush on Saul Bass. Hell: (and How to Avoid Hell), subtitled The Dogma of Hell, Illustrated by Facts Taken from Profane and Sacred History (Tan Books, 1989, originally published 1883) is a real gem. Bright satanic red with the word Hell in enormous Gothic script, this book guarantees you will be left alone on busses, trains, and long flights.

Unlike the Inferno it describes, Hell: (and How to Avoid Hell)... is misleadingly large. Only the first 100 pages are the original work of Fr. F.X. Schouppe, a French Jesuit about whom I could uncover little information, other than that he did missionary work in India. Publisher Thomas Nelson saw fit to append his own thoughts on the subject with the overlong "How to Avoid Hell." At the expense of my immortal soul, I blipped over this section. Mr. Nelson's instructions were predictable: (1) Be Catholic. (2) Repeat.

Fr. Schouppe had a knack for dramatic narrative. Most Hell Lore is leadenly expository, with anonymous sinners and descriptions of the horrors that await piled on ad absurdum. In his tales of Hell, Schouppe wisely maintains the "could it be true?" creepiness of urban legends. Through friend of a friend accounts and visionary saint reports, he "supports" the cry of many a suffering soul in these and other pages: "There is a Hell, and I am in it!"

"Vincent of Beauvais, in the twenty-fifth book of his history, narrates the following fact, which he says happened in the year 1090: Two young libertines, whether seriously or through mockery, had made a mutual promise: whichever of the two died first would come and tell the other in what state he was. So one died, and God permitted him to appear to his companion. He was in a horrible state and seemed to be the prey of cruel sufferings, which consumed him like a burning fever and covered him with sweat. He wiped his forehead with his hand and let a drop of his sweat fall onto his friend's arm, while saying to him: 'That is the sweat of hell; you shall carry the mark of it until death." That infernal sweat burned the arm of the living man, and penetrated his flesh with unheard-of pains. He profited by this awful information and retired to a monastery."

In another story, which Schouppe swears took place in the winter of 1847 to 1848, a 29-year-old British widow—very rich, quite profligate, and recently compromised by a knight of the realm—was scared straight.

"One evening, or rather one night, for it was close upon midnight, she was reading in her bed some novel, coaxing sleep. One o'clock struck by the clock; she blew out her taper. She was about to fall asleep when, to her great astonishment, she noticed that a strange, wan glimmer of light, which seemed to come from the door of the drawing room, spread by degrees into her chamber, and increased momentarily. Stupefied at first and not knowing what this meant, she began to get alarmed, when she saw the drawing-room door slowly open and the young lord, the partner of her disorders, enter the room. Before she had time to say a word, he seized her by the left wrist, and with a hissing voice, syllabled to her in English: "There is a Hell!" The pain she felt in her arm was so great that she lost her senses.
When, half an hour later, she came to again, she rang for her chambermaid. The latter, on entering, noticed a keen smell of burning. Approaching her mistress, who could hardly speak, she noticed on her wrist so deep a burn that the bone was laid bare and the flesh almost consumed; this burn was the size of a man's hand."

The reader may be shocked to learn the young lord...HAD DIED ONLY HOURS BEFORE!

Purgatory is somewhat larger than Hell—by 327 pages to be precise in Purgatory Explained... (Tan Books, 1994, originally published in 1893). A later work by Fr. Schouppe, it covers the Church's other most brilliant innovation: Purgatory—Heaven's Greyhound Station. Purgatory is Heck to Hell's Hell, a place where those who sinned lightly in life can work off lingering sins. No one REALLY wants to go to Purgatory. It's literally as uncomfortable as Hell, filled with spiritual flame and ice to burn and freeze off all residual sin before one can enter Heaven. As unpleasant as it is, and as long as you have to endure it (mere weeks to thousands of years), it doesn't seem so bad, considering that (1) Heaven is the inevitable result, and (2) it's not Hell.

With paradise in sight, the souls of Purgatory are a passive if whiny bunch. Despite suffering all the torments of Hell, the semi-damned end their tortured kvetchings with an offhand "All things considered, I can't complain." Rev. Schouppe elucidates with the example of Sister Theresa, a pious Italian nun, dead in 1859 of apoplexy, who was evidently not pious enough to avoid Purgatory:

"Twelve days later, on November, a sister named Anna Felicia, who succeeded [Theresa] in office, went to the sacristy and was about to enter, when she heard moans which appeared to come from the interior of the room. Somewhat afraid, she hastened to open the door; there was no one. Again she heard moans, and so distinctly that, notwithstanding her ordinary courage, she felt herself overpowered by fear. 'Jesus! Mary!' she cried, "what can that be?" She had not finished when she heard a plaintive voice, accompanied with a painful sigh, "Oh! My God, how I suffer! Oh! Dio, che peno tanto!" The sister, stupefied, immediately recognized the voice of poor Sister Theresa. Then the room was filled with a thick smoke, and the spirit of Sister Theresa appeared, moving towards the door and gliding along by the wall. Having reached the door, she cried aloud, "Behold a proof of the mercy of God." Saying these words, she struck the upper panel of the door, and there left the print of her right hand, burnt in the wood as with a red-hot iron. She then disappeared."

Sister Anna points out this flaming palm print to her fellow nuns, and the Catholic Indulgence machine was switched on. All present nuns took Holy Communion and prayed so that her stay in Purgatory might be brief (FYI Noncatholics: Prayers, masses, and similar temporal activities act as a "Get Out of Jail Free" card for souls waiting out Purgatory. This particularly pissed off Martin Luther). In due time...

"On the third day... a globe of brilliant light appared before [Sister Anna Felicia], illuminating her cell with the brightness of daylight... [Sister Theresa's voice said] 'I died on a Friday, the day of the Passion, and behold, on a Friday, I enter into eternal glory! Be strong to bear the cross, be courageous to suffer, love poverty.' Then adding, affectionately, 'Adieu, adieu, adieu!' she became transfigued, and like a light, white, and dazzling cloud, rose toward Heaven and disappeared."

Interestingly, Schouppe's Purgatory Explained... turns up a large number of clergymen and women in its unfriendly confines.

"Venerable Sister Frances of Pampeluna, whom we have before mentioned, one day saw in Purgatory a poor priest whose fingers were eaten away by frightful ulcers. He was thus punished for having at the altar made the sign of the cross with too much levity, and without the necessary gravity... [Another] had to undergo forty years of suffering for having by his neglect allowed a person to die without the Sacraments; another remained there for forty-five years for having performed the sublime functions of his ministry with a certain levity... A Bishop, whose liberality had caused him to be named almoner, was detained there for five years for having sought that dignity..."

Observations and Conclusions

All folktales have consistencies specific to the people who create them. By way of example, the Grimms' fairy tales are riddled with reoccurrences of the number three, the importance of doing good deeds for scurvy vagrants, and Horatio Alger social climbing. In kind, we note consistencies in Roman Catholic Hell Lore: (1) Eternal punishment, (2) Mocking demons, (3) Three "R" of behavior on the part of the damned: remorse, revenge, and resignation.

Eternal punishment is the most obvious feature of Hell Lore. Borne of the church responsible for the refinements of the Inquisition, Catholic Hell lacks for no ideas on eliciting human suffering. Perhaps it all rests with Dant... Mere pitchforkery wasn't enough for the Florentine poet—punishing his political enemies required sadistic wit. Suicides were turned into dead trees, unable to slay themselves or do much else, while corrupt church officials were sealed into cast-iron vestments, burning with hellish fire. Classically trained priests undoubtedly picked up on this, and so the clever tortures of a Hell filled with notable and anonymous sinners developed. The visions of the saints, you'll notice, are generally straightforward and unironic, except perhaps in obvious ways.

Mocking demons are another feature. Devils and demons are always fallen angels, hideously ugly, and never at a loss to tempt in life and then torture in death. This is one place where the priests and nuns diverge from the poetical Dant... Dant..'s demons are mordantly witty rogues. In Catholic Hell Lore they become mere clockpunchers, satisfied to replay the sinners' violations like a tape loop. Hell is cruelly ironic but never funny in Catholic Hell Lore. It might be that the priests thought their culturally illiterate flock might miss the nuances of Dant..'s Inferno. Certainly Canto XXI, verse 136-139, where the captain devil salutes his men with his "bugle of an asshole" would be unacceptable, not to mention hilariously ineffective, in Sunday school.

Finally, like Elisabeth K..bler-Ross' stages of terminal illness, the sinners in Catholic Hell Lore spend their time tumbling through three stages of damnation. Beyond torture, it seems there is little else to do in Hell then to experience remorse, revenge, and resignation.

To begin with, no matter who you are, no matter what a hardass you were, no matter how black your soul—whether you're Hitler, John Wayne Gacy, Judas Iscariot, or Martin Luther (oh yes, there's a special place in Catholic Hell for him)—in Hell you will be the sorriest S.O.B. on the planet, weeping bloody tears for every life you took, every moment you spent spreading evil.

Revenge is another pasttime, usually spent inflicting pain upon your fellows, and particularly your companions in life. If Bucky gave you a copy of Penthouse Letters, you will spend several millennia chasing him down, beating his head in, and chewing his brains. Of course, he'll get back at you for mixing him that Manhattan or enticing him to order the French Dip on a Lenten Friday.

Resignation is the final stage, and probably the most difficult to comprehend or accept. The dead are not simply sorry for their trespasses, no matter how slight we might consider their sin they realize that, in God's mysterious plan, it makes perfect sense to be persecuted for all eternity for their crimes. Incest, rape, murder, heresy, usury, idolatry, theft, lying, jerking off—all deserve banishment to the earth's nether regions, followed by indescribable eternal agony. In Hell Lore, after shrieking for hundreds of years, every soul sits back—preferably on an area neither too hot nor too pointy— and sighs, oh well, I had it coming.

Starting to see why Roman Catholics are so seriously hung-up? It's not just the rhythm method and the edicts against masturbation; it's the demand for Orwellian doublethink. Get ready for the biggest Hell Lore bombshell: As a Catholic, you must fear Hell. However, you must not avoid sin simply because you fear Hell, but rather because you fear offending an all-forgiving God, who must ship you to the Hell he created because he is so absolutely good, he can't allow the merest inkspot of sin stain on those surrounding him. Not sinning because you fear the Hell so adequately described to you by the Church's indoctrinators is a sin itself.

Got that?

As frightening and as bleak a concept as Hell is, the Church doctors fail to mention its single cold comfort: the inexpressible remorse of never seeing God's face notwithstanding, it's not oblivion. If the afterlife really is pure nothingness, Church law collapses. If eternal fire is at the end of the road, however, we the living can feel we aren't just a biological accident. Our actions have meaning, and our existence is not arbitrarily blotted out upon death. We have value, even if our value only rests in being the devil's pincushions.

®2003 Dan Kelly
This article originally appeared in Book Happy.

Currently listening : Big Come Up By Black Keys Release date: 14 May, 2002

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Garry Wills and Why I Am a Lapsed Catholic

I wrote this one for the Chicago Journal a few years ago. It remains one of my favorite pieces. You don't have to be Catholic to enjoy it, but it helps.


Why I Am a Lapsed Catholic
By: Dan Kelly


Garry Wills is a Roman Catholic. We know this for sure because Wills..Northwestern U. adjunct professor and author of 30 books..has recently published Why I Am a Catholic, a book title bearing no secrets of its contents.


Dan Kelly is also a Roman Catholic. I know this for sure because he is me, and for 35 years I have identified myself as such. I do so because I am of Irish descent, and from the point when my Celtic ancestors stopped sacrificing kid goats to bog gods, we Irish have been interlocked with the Church of Popery. Like Garry Wills, priests and nuns populated my family, I attended mass every Sunday to take communion, and was even confirmed.


Unlike Wills, I stopped going to church. As the Chicago Journal's church reviewer, I've spent more time in the heathens' and heretics' enclaves than in my birth religion's churches. In the old days I would be considered a fallen Catholic and surely damned. In these times when the church is gasping for breath under the weight of scandal, low attendance, and burgeoning numbers of Protestants and Muslims, I am more gently considered a "lapsed Catholic," like a library card in need of renewal.


I bear no particular grudge against the Church. I have many happy memories of a Catholic boyhood; the Chicago Archdiocese provided me with an above par secondary education; and I am permanently imprinted on women who wear school uniforms..though I suspect this was not one of their goals for me. I left for the usual disagreements, over what constituted sin, the seemingly contradictory nature of much Church doctrine, and the nastier events that do not bear repeating here.


Oh, I'll repeat them. One of the larger problems the Mother Church has is with refusing to face up to its non-stellar history in pederasty and its concealment, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and so on. I'd continue, but I might be accused of bitterness. Not true. I bear no ill will to the Church. Tis only more of the tough love it showed to me and my weak-willed human ways. Yet even in the lapsed Catholic, Catholicism is a dandelion root, always lying in wait to burst forth anew. I'm not alone. Garry Wills, again, shares that with me, though he positively cultivates said dandelions.


A former Jesuit seminarian, Wills unfortunately already eliminates himself from representing the average American Catholic. Still, while Wills expresses it in rarefied terms, the sentiment is sincere. Dividing his works between Church (Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit; Bare Ruined Choirs) and State (Lincoln at Gettysburg; Nixon Agonistes), Wills has always reserved a segment of his sizable intellectual gifts to propagating his faith, supporting the Catholic Church's unique hierarchical structure, while insisting that the Catholic laity take a greater position in the management of their Church. Why I Am a Catholic is the latest bullet from Wills' intellectual gun, and he came to chat about it September 9, 2002, at the Harold Washington Library. As a lapsed Jesus cookie eater, I was all over it.


I'd never been in the Harold Washington Library Auditorium before despite repeated visits to the library for any number of research projects. Above all, it offered a welcome coolness after walking through what I hoped was the final humid-as-soup day of summer 2002. Twenty minutes early, I guaranteed myself a place in the front of the book-signing line with number 13. One bad apostle too many.


Despite my own premature greyness, my hair was no match for the snow on the roof crowd that slowly filled the auditorium. I'm not sure if it's a reflection on Wills' age (68), or that the only people who care enough to debate Catholic doctrine seem to be in their 70s and 80s. I don't imagine adjunct professors of history get many 18-year-old girl groupies. Looking about, I recognized the good people of the audience in a distant memory of early morning masses. Round, European faces. Irish, German, Italian, and Polish faces. The faces of the Catholic immigrants that flooded this country a century ago, scaring the scat out of the Protestant majority, who thought the Pope had only to snap his fingers to make the unwashed hordes completely forswear contraception and overrun America. This audience itself had seat-filling fear. The room is side-heavy, and if we were on the Eastland we would have already toppled into the Chicago River. As a side note, there were people closer to my age in the audience. Only a cupful in an ocean of wrinkles, I smelled the scent of extra credit and professorial hero worship about them.


Conspicuously absent were men of the cloth; at least those identifiable by Roman collars or dickey. Wills has become a figure of controversy in the church (at least among well-read Catholics and easily annoyed clergymen). I wondered if any frantic seminarians would leap up during the talk, countering Wills' arguments in high-pitched Latin before excommunicating him with bell, book, and candle. I secretly prayed that an old woman would suddenly bolt up from her walker, cursing at Wills while ripping open her shirt to reveal the words "I (HEART) PIUS X" tattooed across her shriveled chest.


I considered more seriously that it was likely the mass of people sitting around me saw Vatican II firsthand. Vatican II, when the Catholic faith was turned inside-out by reformer Popes John XXIII and Paul VI. As a young Catholic, the explosive decisions of VII were everyday matters. I thought nothing of attending a mass said in English by a priest who faced the congregation. I thought even less of getting sausage on a Friday night pizza, grounds for eternal hellfire only a decade before. The people in that audience saw both sides of that bit of history, as did Wills, who remains a staunch supporter of Vatican II's reforms. Yet, Wills wanted more. His previous book, Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit, was a lambasting of a Church hierarchy that regularly lied to itself to cover up corruption and vileness. Why I Am a Catholic is its sequel; a retort to those who asked him why, if he found so much that stank about Catholicism, he stuck by the Church of Il Papa and the Blessed Virgin Mary.


Ah, yes, the book.


Honest to St. Pete, I tried to read the book before the event.


I even used birthday money I'd rather have dropped on an Elliot Smith album or even, honestly, Wills' biography of St. Augustine, to buy the book. Like many of Wills' books, it is an exercise in verbal density. Wills' big juicy brain pulsates on every page, and he is not a handholder in any respect. Consider further the sort of mind that writes statements of jubilant Poindexterity like this:


"I took time off in the summer of 1959 to do what I had long wanted to do..to go over [Catholic intellectual G.K.] Chesterton's notebooks from his time of crisis."


Oh boy!


Getting past Wills' stories of chumming around with fellow conservative William F. Buckley and poring over Chesterton and St. Augustine, he makes for a compelling case for greater activity and involvement on the part of the Catholic laity. It's a good book, but not potato chip reading. Sit in a comfy chair, pour yourself a stiff one, and buckle down for a night of rereading sentences.


Returning to the talk: After a brief delay brought on by the lateness of the bookseller sponsoring the event, an unseen rock band ripped into an explosive instrumental rendition of "Viva Las Vegas." Wills arrived in a bright red and sequined tux, riding a flaming Harley Davidson in a sustained wheelie through the crowd. By the third pass, the bike exploded, tossing him behind the podium where he landed in a perfect split. After using his switchblade comb to tame an unruly cowlick, Wills pulled his notes from his back pocket and began to speak. We tried to concentrate on his words, but his insanely white teeth flashed blindingly..a brightness compounded by the single ruby embedded in his front tooth.


No. That didn't really happen.


Looking natty in a charcoal grey suit and sensible tie, the silvery haired and stonefaced Wills walked onstage and took the podium before a large scarlet curtain. For a figure of controversy, he must be quite a disappointment for his foes. The very picture of staid conservatism, Wills projects the temperament of..and in fact somewhat resembles..a large glass of warm milk. Speaking in low, measured tones, Wills demonstrated the skill of projecting intelligence and certainty of one's opinion ably used by college professors the world over to cow undergrads.


Wills is unsummarizable, but there were highlights.


Wills lost no time and started off with abuse. Newsworthiness never hurts book sales, and Wills seems to display an unfortunate knack to create work during particular times of tragedy and controversy. His book Nixon Agonistes did only so-so sales in hardcover, but the paperback release coincided with Tricky Dick's immolation. Likewise, the sudden spate of priests punished for pederasty and bishops held accountable for covering it up, tweaked sales of Wills' Papal Sin and the current Why I Am a Catholic.


As with the book, Wills' talk is not about tearing down but fixing up his beloved Church. Wills acknowledges that, papal thought to the contrary, it has never been a perfect and infallible church, not since day one, and that "Church" meant everyone, not just those on top. It is a church in constant evolution, occasionally split by factionalism and internecine feuds. Fools have been at the helm, and Church governance often reflected the bad ideas of the times. Modern times call for new ideas though.


Wills' speaking style is much like his writing style. Chesterton and Augustine are heaved about like shotputs, and he makes repeated reference to how he is perceived in the letters he received in response to papal Sin. One letter declared him the Antichrist, a revelation that caused more laughter than bloody shreiks of terror from the audience.


A canny and legal thinker, Wills gentlemanly ripped into hoary old Catholic traditions to display the falsity of believing a tradition to be Holy Writ despite evidence to the contrary. Masses were said in Latin for so long because that was the language of the Western priesthood. It might be more appropriate to present it in Aramaic, the original language of Jesus and the apostles, for example, but even more appropriate to present it in the vernacular of the community. Likewise the celibate priesthood emerged from the tradition of the Desert Fathers, a batch of Christian, pagan, and Jewish nutball hermits who practiced body-damaging austerities in the early centuries of the church, inexplicably drawing the faithful to them in droves through their "holiness." Monkeys saw and did, and priests and bishops too began deny themselves any of the things the Good Lord created to make life enjoyable.


Tradition then, according to Wills, became the rule rather than scriptural law. In a recent Encyclical, Pope John Paul II claimed priestly celibacy dependent on Matthew 19:12


Thus:


"For there are eunuchs who were born that way from their mother's womb; and there are eunuchs who were made eunuchs by men; and there are also eunuchs who made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to accept this, let him accept it."


The number of self-castrated members of the Catholic clergy is mercifully small, I think, so this passage is largely taken metaphorically.


Wills counters with


I Corinthians 9:5


"Do we not have a right to take along a believing wife, even as the rest of the apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas?" (Cephas meaning the very married Simon Peter the Apostle)


The scripture flinging continued, leaving the papacy looking rather befuddled and Wills, despite his best intentions, looking like a complete Protestant. Sorry, Dr. Wills.


So where does the neo-Catholic Wills go, where they haven't yet driven him from the sanctuary with tar, feathers, and brickbats? Why the Sheil Center at Northwestern U., the Web site of which makes it look downright kool to be a Katholik. Sheil is Wills' favorite example of where changes are slowly being made. Women chaplains are taking on more responsibilities, for example, repairing another open wound the Holy See has yet to dress. Women priests, or for that matter married priests..the old boys club shudders at the thought, even as the Grim reaper thins their ranks. Wills noted a recent Nation article by Angela Bonavoglia, detailing the Church's current progressive reform movement, led not by priests and bishops but emerging lay groups formed of members of the Estrogen Squad. Women have always taken a greater hand in religion then men, leading Wills to declare the the inevitability of female Catholic priests


Throughout Wills speech, one thing reoccurs to me and, I'm sure, the rest of the Catholics in the audience: NONE OF THESE THOUGHTS ARE NEW TO US. Few of my friends are Catholic. To them I emerged from a weird and mysterious church with an apparently fascistic leader, bizarre blood rituals, abusive priests and nuns, and really, really bad hymns. The foremost thought is that if you haven't lapsed or left, you probably fall into lockstep with whatever Il Papa issues from Rome. Nonsense. Wills has made a career of writing down the conversations from 95 percent of all Catholics' dinner tables. There's just that darned entrenched hierarchy.


After fielding somewhat softball questions from the audience..no screaming Opus Dei assassins rapelled down to take him out with razor-sharp communion wafers..Wills closed with a business-like thank-you and strolled off. His handlers announced that persons with the numbers of 1 through 25 could line up to have their copies of Why I Am a Catholic signed. Keeping mine pristine for possible exchange at the bookstore, I skedaddled. I left, still not entirely convinced to return to the Mother Church until she shaped up, lost the arrogance, and remembered that we the people are the Church too...all sentiments echoed by Wills. Ah, but Wills..crafty debater that he is..planted a burrowing thought in my head. If you disagree with her, that's all the more reason to stay and fix her. The man would have made a helluva priest, I tell you.

Currently listening : Fires in Distant Buildings By Gravenhurst Release date: 20 September, 2005

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Behold! God's Brass Knuckles!
Category: Writing and Poetry

I have a feeling some of my MySpace subscribers may not have seen my on-again, off-again online Fr. Dan novel. Oh my, you're in for a treat, if I do say so myself.

Please stop by and check it out.

If the Rik Rawling "cover" doesn't get you clicking, nothing will.

Currently listening : Death Chants, Breakdowns and Military Waltzes By John Fahey Release date: 02 February, 1999

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Phanphic -or- I Am a Middle-Aged Woman Who Calls Herself "Lemur McFurfeathers"

This got a few laughs over at my Live Journal blog. Maybe you'll like it. Of course, several of you are my LJ friends. Consequently, having to read this twice will not only make it not funny anymore, you may actually find yourself hating me. Or not.


Mr. Dan Kelly writes his one and only bit of highly predictable cross-over fanfic.

24 Hours of X-Files

One day, Scully and Mulder foudn the cigarette-smoking man. After looking longingly at each other and after Mulder soul-kissed Xander, Scully finally said somethign to Mulder who she was talking to while in love with him:

Scully: Mulder, this crusade will destroy you. Please, Mulder, stop.

Mulder: I can't, Scully. The truth is out there, but that black-lunged son-of-a-bitch won't tell us what it is.

Then Mulder cried manpain tears.

Cigarette-Smoking Man: Heh heh heh. It seems we're at an impasse, Agent Mulder.

Mulder: Blah blah blah.

Scully Blah blah weep blah. Weep weep. Blah.

Suddenly, a blonde man with blonde hair camed in and he was hot too with a smokey voice though he hadn't said anything yet. Mulder thought the blonde man was hot but felt ashamed of his uncommon desires. Scully also thought he was hot and wanted to "make love" to him because he was so great in The Lost Boys. The man was Jack Bauer which was his name, and he was a CTU agent with a gun. He would bend the law and even break it because it was the right thing to do.

Jack Bauer: Let me handle this, agents.

CSM: (Scoffs) Good luck, boy. I've watched presidents die!

Jack Bauer: WHERE IS THE TRUTH!?! (Shoots off CSM's ear then steps on his head) WHERE IS THE TRUTH, YOU MISERABLE BASTARD!?!! (shoots off his big toe) ANSWER ME, DAMN IT!!! AGGGGH!!

CSM: Eek!! We're keeping the aliens on ice at 45th and Wolcott! The black oil will be released on August 23, 2008! No more, I beg of you!

Jack Bauer: (To Mulder and Scully) And you couldn't get results like that in nine seasons? (Scoffs)

Then they all had teh orgy buttsecks.

Currently listening : American Primitive, Vol. 2 By Various Artists Release date: 04 October, 2005

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Joseph Cornell

Here's a rerun of a piece I wrote a year back about Joseph Cornell and the Art Institute of Chicago's Bergman Collection.


Paint Spatters and Pixie Dust
by Dan Kelly
®2006 Dan Kelly


Joseph Cornell, artist, was the farthest thing from being a Chicagoan. He was a New Yorker, in fact, but this may be forgiven in light of the man's work. Labeling him a knickerbocker might be a stretch too. Between the man's ethereal work and personal behavior, he seemed more than a shade removed from our planet.


Alien, New Yorker, or hybrid of both, Cornell has a permanent connection with Chicago through the Bergman collection of surrealist art at the Art Institute of Chicago. Best known for a series of shadow boxes made between the late 1930s and his death in 1972, the Institute currently holds 37 of Cornell's boxes, as well as assorted collages. Generously donated in 1983 by art collectors Edwin and Lindy Bergman, the collection constitutes one of the largest single collections of Cornell's work on display anywhere. On permanent exhibition, Cornell's boxes hide in the rear of the Institute's second-floor; a quiet collection of surprises and mystery for anyone willing to put in the legwork through the museum's winding halls.


I do so semi-frequently. Being of amateurish artistic bent, I frequently visit Joe's boxes, seeking inspiration for the boxes I create in my rare spare time. (Being, furthermore, of a cheap disposition, I visit most often on free Tuesdays). In repetition one grows in strength, frequent visits allowing greater opportunities to filch Cornell's ideas. But even when I'm not looking for insight on proper cordial glass placement or what arrangement of marbles, paint spatters, and clipped children's book illustrations creates the strongest visual statement, I like to visit and wonder at them. Smallish world windows, the shadow boxes are as self-contained, compact, and ultimately unknowable as the man himself. Therein lay their appeal for me. They show much but give away nothing easily.


"The Bergman collection of Cornell boxes really is one of this city's little-known treasures," says Colleen Thorne, a research associate in the Institute's Department of Contemporary Art for four years. Graciously agreeing to walk through the gallery with me, Ms. Thorne provided assessments and tidbits of information on Cornell the man and his work the average patron misses out on.


As a Cornell groupie, most of it I already knew. Born Christmas Eve 1903 to a reasonably well-off family, the sensitive young Cornell showed no initial artistic skill or ambition and never attended art school. After graduating from high school and the death of his father, he took various jobs in downtown Manhattan to support his family. Office work provided little interest to the dreamy Cornell, but it did give him the chance to prowl New York's many book and antique shops of the time. Such forays allowed him to collect the ephemera of the past..printed and otherwise..especially regarding the frou-frou subjects dear to him, such as ballet, fairy tales, opera, penny arcades, birds, toys, silent movies, and such like.


In time, one of his trips brought him to Julien Levy's gallery, which had a store of photographic materials available for view in a back room. Accounts vary, but at some point Cornell approached Levy or his wife with collages he'd made in the style of Max Ernst. Levy, perhaps the single figure most responsible for bringing Surrealism to the States, was impressed enough to ask to see more from Cornell, eventually inviting him to display work at one of his early shows. Gradually, the pale, effete young man from Nyack came to be associated and associate with the artistic bad boys of the age. Yet, Cornell was never a real part of that artistic movement, or any of the others that took place over the course of his life. He was, more or less, isolated and entirely unique.


Sometime in the fifties, Edwin and Lindy Bergman became acquainted with Cornell's work. The Bergmans were well-to-do Hyde Parkers, Edwin having made his fortune in aluminum-smelting. We are fortunate that in the Bergmans' case, money held hands with good taste. The Bergmans knew Cornell well..though a better claim might be that they were better acquainted with the man than others. Aficionados of surrealism, the couple first bought Cornell's work through dealers, but eventually wanted to meet the man himself. Cornell had the reputation of a hermit, but "homebody" might be the more accurate description. He was under a benign yet demanding house arrest born out of duty to his aging mother and brother Robert, who had cerebral palsy.


Arrangements to meet were made through a mutual acquaintance, Italian artist Piero Dorazio. According to his personal rules of etiquette, calling Cornell out of the blue was uncalled for. Knowing this, Dorazio suggested the Bergmans were likelier to get an invitation if he informed Cornell that they were bringing a surprise gift from him. The artifice worked, and many a time Edwin, on periodical trips to New York stopped in to visit Cornell's house at 3708 Utopia Parkway in Queens; to buy his work, chat with him, his brother, and mother; and nosh on the sugary pastries for which Cornell had a predatory taste.


A healthy artist/patron relationship developed over the years but didn't last. Though Cornell enjoyed both giving and receiving gifts, he was occasionally, for reasons known only to him, prone to ask for one back. Sometime in the 60s, Cornell decided that the Bergmans owned too many of his works (while a packrat, it bothered Cornell to imagined his own work collected and sequestered away by any one individual). When Bergman continued to buy boxes through dealers, Cornell became even more off-putting. According to Deborah Solomon's Cornell biography Utopia Parkway, a Manhattan dealer informed him, "You're Bergman from Chicago? I'm not supposed to sell you anything." Regardless, the Bergmans remained faithful fans of Cornell's work, purchasing and decorating their apartment with his boxes and collages. The exhibition catalog has this to say about the Bergman's relationship to their collection:


"One had a strong sense that the works were an active and dynamic part of family life, that they were known intimately and re-experienced daily. For example, a large glass cabinet, created where there was once a doorway, gave easy access to a number of boxes and assemblages by Cornell and others, especially to some of Cornell's earliest pieces and memorabilia that require handling and opening to be properly viewed."


Photos of their apartment confirm this. Where the average modern home might have a Hummel figurine collection or swoony Thomas Kinkade Painter of Light.. print, the Bergmans displayed the works of Dubuffet, Ernst, Masson, Miró, Gorky, Graham, and Matta..all of whom now share space in the gallery with Cornell.


Like the man himself, Cornell's boxes are demanding in terms of their display. While most of the Institute's holdings are satisfied with a wall or ceiling, the boxes' three dimensions require positioning that allows the viewer to see them from different angles. All are enshrined under plexiglass, several standing on tabletops to allow patrons the opportunity to sit and observe the boxes from all sides. Two other displays were specifically conceived of by Cornell, and reconstructed by the Institute. For example, several of the Hotel and Observatory series are nestled away in a darkened cubbyhole of a room: a blue velvet backing for boxes that stress themes of space, planets, and stars.


One of the latter boxes is 1954's Hotel de l Étoile. A remarkably sparse production in white, with the spare elements of a painted dowel, clipped picture of the constellation Auriga, and white paint spatters seen through a "window" in the rear. Though Cornell's initial influence were Victorian shadow boxes, Ms. Thorne pointed out how Cornell reflected the art movements in effect at the time of a box's construction. She indicated how the spatters reflect the action painting of Jackson Pollock, while retaining several Cornellian themes, such as European hotels, nostalgia, mythology, and constellations. The latter is echoed not only in the starry driplets of paint, but in the piece's surname (Étoile, French for "star") and the tripled meaning of Hollywood starlets like Hedy Lamar, Lauren Bacall, and Marlene Dietrich with whom Cornell was more than mildly obsessed.


Catercorner to Hotel de l Étoile is Untitled (Soap Bubble Set) 1957, a favorite of mine, but not of Ms. Thorne's. A later work reflective of his first Soap Bubble Set in 1936..considered his breakthrough work..Cornell positions one of the hundreds of clay soap bubble pipes he bought in bulk at the 1939 World's Fair beside a cordial glass (filled with a marble rather than liqueur), a moon map, and a metal ring dangling from a thin steel bar that acts as a rail for a yellow wood ball. The piece is childlike without being childish, and manages to look quite antiquated though representative of modern art.


My mini-tour with Ms. Thorne has its regretful points, as she explains how many of the pieces on display were meant to be interactive. Out of the dark, across the way, we find a second Cornell-inspired display set on rose trellis-like stands. These are similar to those employed by the artist in his 1949 "Aviary" exhibit at the Charles Egan Gallery in New York. Forgotten Game shows a field of portholes inhabited by cut-out pictures of birds. However, the box is a kinetic piece, set into action by dropping a ball into an opening on the right side, which thereupon rolls down hidden ramps, coming into view occasionally through the holes and ringing bells along the way. Not anymore. The box rests behind glass, out of our hands. Butterfly Habitat's paper butterflies flutter gently behind frosted glass when the box is handled..memories flitting and breezing in the mind's peripheral vision. Thorne also points out the odd juxtaposition of the butterflies with a nearby Cornell bird collage. Birds are pretty to look at, but they are also animals of prey. Thus, Cornell keeps his menageries separated. Like the zoo, the predators aren't allowed to wander about the small mammal house.


"Nostalgia" is another unavoidable concept when discussing Cornell's boxes, but I wonder if it's the best word. The shadow boxes are less about longing for one particularly perfect period than collections of what the artist probably imagined to be the best remnants of many different times. Childhood recurs: jacks and alphabet blocks occupy a sacred space with rubber balls and bubble blowing pipes. A friend once told me of a time she showed French philosopher Françoise Collin how to use the Internet for the first time. Entering her name in a search engine, Collin was stunned at the frequency with which her name appeared, particularly in regards to the most obscure conferences she'd attended. That even these minute references were preserved astonished her, and she kept murmurring about "la poussière de la vie...", "the dust of life." So too with the boxes; even Cornell's best-preserved objects are only flecks and shavings of memory. Recalled and brought to the fore just barely, and even then out of reach. would request it back if a person didn't seem to appreciate it enough. Cornell remains both cruel and kind. He gives much, but keeps it all behind glass: confinement combined with voyeurism. We can see and even indirectly play with his toys, but we're never allowed to touch them, or him, consequently. As Ms. Thorne puts it, "He gave us enough to hang on to, but he's constantly eluding us."


Despite the pains he went to to artificially age his work (by leaving the boxes outside to weather and crack, for example) to gain the look of something ready to falter at a single harsh breath, Cornell often fretted about his art's fragility. Wishing to have it both ways is an aesthetically punishing state, since Cornell also preferred his art to be directly experienced; to be played with, even to the point where he sometimes lent the boxes to neighborhood children until they grew bored with them..whereupon he'd exchange the old one for a new box. In some instances, Cornell's boxes are like unplayed musical instruments; pretty to look at, but a little dead without interaction.


When asked about the boxes' removal from the public's busy fingers, she agrees that Cornell would likely have been horrified..being a sensitive, virginal Christian Scientist for most of his life he was easily horrified, mind you..that his boxes were no longer available for playtime. "That they're not being used..I'm absolutely certain that would pain him." According to Cornell lore, that's true. Cornell preferred his art to be active and "alive."


"On the other hand, his work is on display in major museums, " Thorne finishes, something she imagines would give even the famously finicky Cornell little to complain about.

Currently listening : Beautiful Maladies: The Island Years By Tom Waits Release date: 16 June, 1998

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Oh, Henry!

A Christmas Classic to Warm Your Cockles...

The Gift of the Magi by Way of Mr. Dan Kelly

Biff and Muffy married against their wealthy parents' wishes and were subsequently disowned and left to survive on their own devices. Still, though they had little but a few sticks of furniture and the clothes on their backs and survived on generic brand gruel, they were in love.

Buffy was famous for her fine black hair, which she had grown since childhood into a long flowing mane. Biff too had a single treasure: his grandfather's gold pocket watch, which he carried wherever he went. On Christmas Eve, wanting to give her husband a lovely gift, Muffy went to wigmaker and had her hair cut off and made into toupees for the town fathers. For the purposes of this story's plot twist, assume that Muffy is wearing a hat and that Biff doesn't immediately realize she's as bald as an egg.

"Darling, here is your present. Oh, I love you so very much," said Muffy.

"A watch fob?" said Biff, "Why, this is wonderful! It will look so smart on my grandfather's watch. But, darling, what happened to your hair?"

"I... I... sold it, to buy your watch fob!"

"Gasp! Such sacrifice! Oh you DO love me! I only wish I had as fine a present for you as this watch fob."

"Oh... I see... So, you don't have anything for me?"

"Fuck no. We're poor, remember? Ah well, it'll grow back. And hey! I have a new watch fob!"

And he happily attached it to his grandfather's watch.

The End

Currently listening : Transatlanticism By Death Cab for Cutie Release date: 07 October, 2003

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