Meme: All about books (of course)

Via Melanie Bettinelli, our favorite kind of meme: one about books.

1. What author do you own the most books by? We inherited an entire shelf full of books by Tolkien when my grandfather passed away. Given that we'd already had quite a few, Tolkien is now far and away the leader.

2. What book do you own the most copies of?
Like Melanie, I think it's the Bible (in several editions and languages) followed by Lord of the Rings.

3. Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions? What are you asking for?

4. What fictional character are you secretly in love with? Aw, sheesh, I don't know. Like Melanie (she's going to think I'm cribbing her answers) I do like Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey.

5. What book have you read the most times in your life? Probably Lord of the Rings.

6. Favorite book as a ten year old? I remember reading Anne of Green Gables and Caddie Woodlawn.

7. What is the worst book you’ve read in the past year? No contest: Outlander, by Diana Gabaldon.

8. What is the best book you’ve read in the past year? Acedia & Me by Kathleen Norris (hi, Melanie!), though I found some of the biographical elements frustrating. But the real contender is the book I'm currently reading: Fire Within: St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, and the Gospel On Prayer by Fr. Thomas Dubay, which is so rich I can only read short bits at at time.

On a different front, Stephen Potter's The Theory And Practice Of Gamesmanship Or The Art Of Winning Games Without Actually Cheating is a hysterical classic. And When Sisterhood Was in Flower by Florence King is completely and inappropriately, laugh-'til-you-fall-off-the-couch funny.

And! Mariette in Ecstasy! A Time of Gifts! Exiles!

9. If you could force everyone you know to read one book, what would it be? I would be curious to see the results if everyone I knew read Dorothy Sayers' The Mind of the Maker (which uses the concept of the Trinity to analyze an author's creative powers) and applied it to their tastes in fiction. That's a really snotty answer, and I'm sorry.

10. What book would you most like to see made into a movie? Declare, by Tim Powers.

11. What is the most difficult book you’ve ever read? The Acting Person, by Karol Wojtyla.

12. What is your favorite book? Darwin says his favorite book is Brideshead Revisited. I really can't pick one. Name of the Rose The Great Gatsby Divine Comedy Jesus of Nazareth...

UPDATE: Thinking this over, I have to answer: The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis.

13. Play? Twelfth Night. I ran lightboard my freshman year for our production and so memorized many of the lines after hearing them over and over again. The sound board tech and I had a countdown to our favorite line (based solely on the delivery of the actor): "O, that record is lively in my soul!"

14. Poem? The only one that springs to mind is The Wreck of the Deutschland by Gerard Manley Hopkins, but that might be because I read Exiles a few months back. Or, if you prefer, Sonnet 91.

15. Essay? The Night the Bed Fell on my Father, from My Life and Hard Times (Perennial Classics) by James Thurber. I don't know if it counts as an essay or a short story, but it's unparalleled as a read-aloud.

16. Who is the most overrated writer alive today? President Obama. Look, the guy writes well enough, but he's not all that.

17. What is your desert island book? The Bible. Cliche, but true.

18. And . . . what are you reading right now? Practical Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare by Peter Reynolds; Fire Within by Fr. Thomas Dubay; The Aeneid (Fitzgerald translation); Notes on Directing: 130 Lessons in Leadership from the Director's Chair by Frank Hauser; several books of children's theater games

Out loud to the girls: D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths; The Twenty-One Balloons by William Pene du Bois.

A Little Legislative Humor

If you need something to cheer your afternoon, it's almost certain that you can congratulate yourself that your workplace is more functional than the New York State Government, which seems to be having trouble adjusting to a sudden change in leadership:

Two dissident Democrats, who had been secretly strategizing with Republicans for weeks, bucked their party’s leaders and joined with 30 Republican senators to form what they said would be a bipartisan power-sharing deal. But the arrangement effectively re-establishes Republican control.

The change upends the agenda in Albany, where Democrats had assumed power in the Senate in January, with 32 seats, after more than 40 years in the minority. Democrats were pushing bills to give tenants more rights, strengthen abortion rights and legalize same-sex marriage this session. And the move underscores the continuing tumult of New York politics, where there have been three governors in less than three years and four Senate presidents since last summer.

Democratic leaders were caught off guard as the Republicans and the two Democratic dissidents, Pedro Espada Jr. of the Bronx and Hiram Monserrate of Queens, moved to topple them, and at one point became so flustered that they turned out the lights in the Senate chamber to try to prevent Republicans from installing new leaders.

Asked by a reporter what was occurring, Senator Malcolm A. Smith, leader of the Senate Democrats who was huddled in the hall with his staff, responded, “I’m trying to find out right now.”

A spokesman for Mr. Smith, who lost the titles of majority leader and Senate president in the shakeup, issued a statement later saying that Democrats would challenge the vote, but it was not clear that they had grounds to do so.

Gov. David A. Paterson, at a news conference Monday evening, called the move “an outrage” and said Albany had become a “dysfunctional wreck.”

The governor also said “I will not allow this,” but then conceded that there was nothing he could do to stop it.
...
Both Mr. Espada and Mr. Monserrate said they would remain Democrats even as they work with Republicans to run the Senate.

Both men have legal troubles. Highlighting the often elastic nature of ethical stands and alliances in Albany, Republicans who earlier this year were calling on Mr. Monserrate to resign after his indictment on felony charges that he stabbed his companion with a broken glass are now welcoming him as part of their power-sharing coalition.

Getting rid of the roach, MrsDarwin-style

I'm sitting peacefully at my breakfast, eating my egg and feeding the baby cheerios and pureed apricot, when I hear the dreaded squeal from my daughter: "A roach!" She had been sitting on the couch when the thing crawled out from underneath and toddled across the floor. (Keep in mind that when I say "roach" I mean "palmetto bug".) So I sigh and go into the living room where, sure enough, this two-inch-long roach is skirting the bookshelves. He's obviously looking for a way out. While he's on the far side of the room, I gingerly tiptoe over to the door and open it about as wide as it can go, then I hightail it back to safety behind the piano. The roach tries to make a foray up a baseboard, flexing its wings in an alarming fashion, but turns again and heads across the wall with the door.

I don't know what it's teaching my children about the value of prayer that the whole time I'm murmuring, "Oh dear sweet Jesus, please let him go out the door. Please, dear Lord, let him find the door and go out."

But -- God be praised! -- he follows the light, climbs over the jamb, and goes outside. I shut the door, carefully. If I slam it he might get startled and fly.

For the next few moments my jumpy nerves are preyed upon by the small fry who think it's funny to sight "bugs" everywhere and give shrill little shrieks. Not funny, ladies. Not funny.

The Vatican's Rifles

A good friend and long time reader sent along a link to this information several months ago, and I've been incredibly remiss in not doing the research to put up this post sooner. However, as I did the research over the last few weeks, I found it very much worth the time. I hope you will too.

It was through a friend in the Catholic blogsphere that I was introduced to the pleasures of studying, collecting and shooting military rifles. The most common and available military rifles are the bolt action rifles carried by the major powers (other than the US, which fielded the semi-automatic M1 Garand) during World War II, in most cases little modified from the versions carried thirty years before in the Great War. This was the last great age of battle rifles with wooden stocks and large cartridges, before the high tech "ugly guns" of the modern world took over.

There are, however, significantly more rare rifles to be found of an earlier vintage, the early cartridge rifles used form the 1860s through 1900, and of these one of the rarest is the M1868 Pontificio, the only modern rifle ever manufactured specifically for the Vatican.

The Pontificio was based on the 1867 Remington rolling block design, and was chambered for the 12.7 x 45 cartridge, one unique to the military of the Papal States, but based closely on the American .50-70 caliber.

It was a single shot rifle built with the very latest mid-19th-century military technology and had the Vatican crest stamped on the receiver.


In our modern world, it seems strange to think of the pope placing an order for the newest military technology. Vatican City today is an independent nation state, but modern popes use their position as heads of state to try to bring a moral voice to the world stage, not to field armies. The M1868 Pontificio comes from the last time when princes of the Church were princes in the worldly sense as well, trying to stand against the tide of secularism and nationalism sweeping across Europe.

To understand the context of the Vatican's last major arms order, one should look back to the beginning of the reign of Blessed Pope Pius IX. Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti was elected pope in 1846 and was hailed throughout Europe as a liberal reformer. At the time, the papal states, of which the pope was the secular ruler, comprised a significant portion of central Italy, and Pius IX made a number of political reforms to their administration, freed all political prisoners, and began a program of modernization, building railways and having street lights installed in Rome. Many nationalists and modernizers who dreamed of a unified Italy hoped that Pius IX might to open to supporting their cause. Nationalist leader Giuseppe Garibaldi, who would eventually be key to destroying the papal states and aiding the unification of Italy under the kings of Sardinia, wrote to Pius:

If these hands, used to fighting, would be acceptable to His Holiness, we most thankfully dedicate them to the service of him who deserves so well of the Church and of the fatherland. Joyful indeed shall we and our companions in whose name we speak be, if we may be allowed to shed our blood in defence of Pio Nono's work of redemption" (October 12, 1847)

However, liberal optimism soon gave way to violent revolution as the 1848 revolutions, sparked by the Paris revolution which brought down the Orleans monarchy and resulted in the Second Republic, swept Europe. Revolutions in the northern areas of Italy brought about minor wars of revolution against Austria, the Catholic monarchy which exerted direct or indirect control over much of Northern Italy. In November 1848, revolution in Rome forced Pius IX to flee from Rome in disguise, taking refuge in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and a Republic of Rome was declared by the revolutionaries in February of 1849. French President Louis Napoleon and the Austrian monarchy sent troops to put down the revolution in Rome, and after fighting throughout the summer and fall of 1849, Pius IX was able to return in April 1850. French troops remained in Rome and the Papal States for the next twenty years, providing the pope with military protection.

However, the protection of French troops began to appear an increasingly mixed blessing in 1859, when the French (not strangers to nationalism and liberalism themselves) joined forces with the nationalist Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia to fight the Austrians in the Second War of Italian Independence. The war was brief (April to July 1859) and the armistice theoretically left the various states of north central Italy independent, but by 1860 the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia had occupied all of Northern Italy, putting a powerful, nationalist country (which was a sometime ally of the Vatican's protector, France) right on the Papal States' northern border. That same year, Garibaldi led his expedition to Sicily (without any state approval) and the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia (not wanting to leave Garibaldi unsupervised in control of Sicily, lest he declare a republic and threaten their own power) sent troops down into southern Italy through the eastern two-thirds the Papal States and annexed them in the process. (The section annexed by Piedmont-Sardinia is shown in purple in the above map.) In March 1861, the first Italian Parliament met in Turin, the capital of Piedmont, and declared Rome to be the capital of the Kingdom of Italy -- despite the fact that Rome was not under their control. The Savoy dynasty under Victor Emmanuel II, which had ruled Piedmont-Sardinia, now clearly intended to rule all Italy from Rome, and in their way stood the pope.

Pius IX, understandably, felt increasingly threatened by these developments and had reason to doubt whether his French protectors would in fact stand up to the Victor Emmanuel and the nationalist forces. In 1860 the Zuavi Pontifici or Papal Zouaves were formed as a military force of volunteers from throughout the world reporting directly to the Vatican.

Zouave refers to the style of uniform worn by the papal soldiers, one based on those of the French North African regiments which became quite popular in the mid-19th century. (One of the few histories of this force to be written in English was published last year: The Pope's Legion: The Multinational Fighting Force that Defended the Vatican)
It was for the Papal Zouaves that the Remington Pontificio was manufactured in 1868. The pictures below show Zouaves with their Pontificio rifles:


In 1868 there were just under 5,000 Papal Zouaves, with the largest contingents from the Netherlands (1,900) and France (1,300). 130 Canadians and 100 Irish were members, as were a few Americans, Scots, English and volunteers from as far away as Africa and China.Unfortunately, this small army would not be enough to hold off the tide of nationalism for long.

In June 1868, Pius IX convoked the First Vatican Council. The final vote on the topic of papal infallibility took place on July 18th. The next day, the Franco-Prussian war was declared, and the council was temporarily suspended so that the bishops could return to their home sees. In early August, Louis Napoleon (now Emperor Napoleon III) withdrew his French troops from Rome because they were needed elsewhere. (France would lose the Franco-Prussian war, and the Second Empire would be replaced by the Third Republic.) Almost immediately, the Kingdom of Italy made moves to seize Rome. On September 10th, King Victor Emmanuel II sent Count Ponza di San Martino to Pius IX with a letter offering to send troops into room to protect the pope, clearly a pretext for annexing Rome and the remainder of the Papal States. Pius IX refused, and on September 11th, the Italian army crossed the border in the Papal States. The Italian army reached Rome on September 19th, and the pope, seeing that the cause was hopeless, ordered the Zouaves to put up only a token resistance, enough to make it clear that the city was taken against its will, but brief enough to minimize loss of life. 19 Papal Zouaves died defending from, and 49 Italian soldiers and four officers were killed while attacking it. The city was captured on September 20th, and was officially annexed to the Kingdom of Italy and made its capital by popular vote in October.

Pius IX indefinitely adjourned the Vatican Council in September, after Rome was captured, and refused to recognize the Kingdom of Italy as the legitimate ruler of Rome, turning down an offer by Victor Emmanuel to grant him sovereignty over the Leonine City but Pius refused the offer because since accepting it would have suggested the the sovereignty was Victor Emmanuel's to give. He remained "the prisoner of the Vatican" until his death in 1878. Pius IX forbade Catholics from being members of the Italian parliament or voting in Italian elections, a breech that would not be wholly healed until the Lateran Treaty of 1929 when Vatican City was established as a sovereign nation and the Vatican recognized Italy's existence.

The Zouaves were disbanded and their rifles were confiscated by the Italian army, which reissued them for their own use, in many cases re-machining them to fire other cartridges. Few remain in their original condition. Many of the men who had served in the Zouaves went on to fight for the French in the remainder of the Franco-Prussian War. Others returned home.

Today, the only military associated with the Vatican is the Swiss Guard, whose standard issue weapons are the same as those of the Swiss army, though modern guns are now not carried in public (though present in the armory).

Was it Greek to him?

From my "Well, you may think you've made a point, but..." files, this paragraph from a review of the book "The Evolution of God" in yesterday's WSJ:

The closer Mr. Wright's analysis draws to the Common Era, the more forceful it becomes. The most striking contention in "The Evolution of God" concerns St. Paul, Christianity's first administrative leader. Ancient religions died off, Mr. Wright claims, because they were designed for specific ethnic groups and possessed no appeal outside them. Judaism spoke to those born into the faith, limiting its potential scope. Paul wanted Christianity to become a global faith, appealing to anyone from any land or ethnic group. So he offered something no faith had offered to that point -- universal brotherhood. Did Jesus intend to start a new, broader-based religion? That's hardly clear -- Christ never used the word "Christian" or instructed his disciples to promote a new faith. (emphasis mine)

I set down the paper and laughed out loud.

Getcher Gun

Darwin is down at the shooting range this evening, so I take this opportunity to present Donald Duck plying his gun.



This is cute, but watch for the in-joke at 2:37.

Well, Good Luck With That

I have the feeling that readers have emailed me about this site a couple times before, and I left it without comment because some topics seem like shooting fish in a barrel for a blog with the tagline "Because most philosophies that frown on reproduction don't survive." However there comes a point when fish who choose to live in barrels deserve to come under fire.

Meet the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.

VHEMT (pronounced vehement) is a movement not an organization. It's a movement advanced by people who care about life on planet Earth. We're not just a bunch of misanthropes and anti-social, Malthusian misfits, taking morbid delight whenever disaster strikes humans. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Voluntary human extinction is the humanitarian alternative to human disasters.

We don't carry on about how the human race has shown itself to be a greedy, amoral parasite on the once-healthy face of this planet. That type of negativity offers no solution to the inexorable horrors which human activity is causing.

Rather, The Movement presents an encouraging alternative to the callous exploitation and wholesale destruction of Earth's ecology.

As VHEMT Volunteers know, the hopeful alternative to the extinction of millions of species of plants and animals is the voluntary extinction of one species: Homo sapiens... us.

Each time another one of us decides to not add another one of us to the burgeoning billions already squatting on this ravaged planet, another ray of hope shines through the gloom.

When every human chooses to stop breeding, Earth's biosphere will be allowed to return to its former glory, and all remaining creatures will be free to live, die, evolve (if they believe in evolution), and will perhaps pass away, as so many of Nature's "experiments" have done throughout the eons.

Now, VHEMT does indeed answer my question of whether their ideas will just die out:

Q: Won’t VHEMT die out when all its members die off?

If an idea lacks enough merit to be passed on without being force-fed from an early age, it probably deserves to be forgotten.

Awareness isn’t passed along in our genes. Every VHEMT Volunteer or Supporter is the result of a breeding couple, and yet we have all decided to stop reproducing. Often, we arrived at this conclusion independently and without support from friends and family.

The concept of voluntary human extinction has a life of its own. It’s an idea whose time has come, though it may be a little late.

I suppose the only way to settle this matter definitively is through a very long term empirical experiment that none of us would live to see the end up, but this strikes me as being in conflict with the basic nature of the human creature. I'm going to intentionally leave any religious angle out of this discussion (from the deeply klutzy attempts on the VHEMT site to justify their position based on all major world religions, it's pretty clear they don't "get" religion to any real degree) and just speak naturalistically -- which for Catholics can be a stand-in for natural law.

Ironically, in an age in which materialism (in the sense of the belief that the physical world is "all there is") is increasingly common, people seem quite often to hold beliefs about the human person which ignore our fundamental nature as a biological species, albeit a aware and rational one. So for instance, VHEMT provides the following FAQ and response:

Q: What about the human instinct to breed?

Humans, like all creatures, have urges which lead to reproduction. Our biological urge is to have sex, not to make babies. Our "instinct to breed" is the same as a squirrel's instinct to plant trees: the urge is to store food, trees are a natural result. If sex is an urge to procreate, then hunger's an urge to defecate.

Culturally-induced desires can be so strong that they seem to be biological, but no evolutionary mechanism for an instinct to breed exists. Why do we stop breeding after we've had as many as we want? If the instinct is to reproduce, how are so many of us able to over ride it? There are too many who have never felt that urge: mutations don't occur in this high a percentage of a population.

Looking to our evolutionary roots, imagine Homo erectus feeling the urge to create a new human. He then has to understand that a cavewoman is needed, sexual intercourse must be engaged in, and they will have to wait nine months.

Um, no. Squirrels and nuts have a symbiotic relationship, but animals do not have a symbiotic relationship with themselves that happens to result in procreation. The entire purpose of a biological species is to perpetuate itself. The reason that we have sexual organs is that this is how we produce descendants. Not only to human beings have a natural urge to reproduce, that is, from a biological point of view, our sole purpose.

One of the fatal problems with this "voluntary extinction" idea from a strictly naturalistic point of view is that it asks humans to do something which no species is meant to do, something which cries out against any species' reason for being. Telling people as a group not a reproduce is like telling people to kill themselves by holding their breath -- it's something we're naturally designed not to do. The idea doesn't just violate our moral notions, it violates the several billion years of evolutions since sexual reproduction first appeared.

As rational creatures with an understanding of the long range implications of our actions, and an appreciation for the beauty of nature, it's appropriate and necessary for us to consider the impact of our civilization on the planet. While other species may have no other option than to follow nature's boom and bust cycle of eating everything available until famine hits and the population dies down to sustainable levels, we rightly seek to make use of our reason to avoid needless destruction and suffering.

However, whether one looks at us from a religious perspective as made in the image and likeness of God, from a philosophical perspective as being unique creatures on the Earth in our capacity to reason, or from a biological perspective as simply another species of large-brained vertebrates, it is the natural purpose of human being to strive to preserve our species and assure it's flourishing -- not in a way that wrecks havoc on the planet (though I think our planet is much more elastic in its ability to survive change than many of its would be protectors give it credit for), both out of an anthropomorphic desire to see other creatures flourish as we do and because we are in the end dependant on the flourishing of our planet, but nonetheless our flourishing as a species is clearly one of our central purposes as a species, and any attempt to act contrary to that is a fundamental denial of what we are. It stems, I suspect, from a tendency to treat human persons as minds, rather than as the full combination of self-aware mind and natural, biological creature. This allows people to think of humans as something which is out of step with the rest of nature -- an alien influence which should voluntarily purge itself so that things can go back to "normal". The thing is, extraordinary though we may be, we are part of Earth's "normal", the result of its history and a species seeking to assure our flourishing just like any other.