Books (no beads nor bech)

Has it become apparent yet that I have two papers to write? Ripped from Facebook.  I'm not bothering with the love or star symbols . . .

The BBC says most people will apparently have read only 6 of the 100 books listed...

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.
5) Put in a note with your total in the subject


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen x
2 The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien x
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte x
4 Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling 
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee x
6 The Bible x
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte x
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell x
9. The Golden Compass - Philip Pullman 
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott x
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy 
13 Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - x 
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier x
16 The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien x
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger x
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell 
22 The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald x
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh x
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky x
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck x (half of it, anyways)
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll x
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame x
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy 
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis x
34 Emma - Jane Austen x
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen x
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis  x
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne 
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell x
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown 
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - L.M. Montgomery  x
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding 
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen  x
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens  x
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley  x
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck 
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov 
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas  x
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding   x (got me through my first break-up.  Graham Greene's The End of the Affair got my through my 3rd - why is he not on this survey?).
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens 
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker 
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett  x
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath  x (hated this book).
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray  x (parts of it)
80 Possession - A.S. Byatt x (half of it . . . it was boring)
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens x
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro (loved the movie!)
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White  x
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle x (parts of it)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad x (I agree - the horror).
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint Exupery 
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole 
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas  x
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare  x (more times than I ever wanted to)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl 
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I've read 39 (ok, some of those were only partial readings).  That's pretty respectable.

Scenes from an Italian life*

Technology:

Student delegate: IT person, the internet is not working in our computer lab.

Italian IT person: Yes. The internet is not working.

Blank stares.

Silence.

Blank stares.

Comprehension:

Student 1: What is the professor drawing on the board?  Is that a graph?

Student 2:  It's lines and squiggles.

Student 1:  Oh.

*I have a fun life, all things considered.

I have returned to Italy for the fifth time.  This year finds me away from the sea, and instead on top of a hill which has 217 steps leading you up or down from the tram line into the city - preferably down, but wondrous things start to happen to your legs once you've gone up enough times.  I come home for lunch these days and make crazy huge salads with corn and ceci (chick peas), provolone chunks and pepperoni (red pepper) and shredded spanish coldcuts, and then I head off to work and class again.  

My job is teaching a sweet two year old boy how to speak and think in English.  I think he knows a lot more than he lets onto.  He surprises me every once and awhile by randomly starting to count in English or repeating oddball words like "kitchen" or "sticky."  I take what I can get, and then repeat them into infinity . . . in fun ways, of course.  We play with noisy cars and colored play-doh together - but they call it "pongo" here.  Or rather "PAAAWHN-go," as the Italians have a love affair with dragging out vowel sounds.

I'm supposed to be taking something like eight classes, working three times a week for one (possibly two) jobs, and writing a thesis in the next few months.  The amount of posts you find upon here will be a measure of how much thesis writing I'm actually getting gone.  But hey, blogs are communication, aren't they?  It's part of my studies . . ..

For some reason I cannot upload photos from my computer, so until that is fixed it will be a much more visually boring blog.  

It's good to be back in Rome.  B3 is back again.

The dearest freshness

Spent my late afternoon today with JPII and the glories of a Santa Marinella sunset. Perched on a nicely-smoothed boulder on the Tyranean Sea, with the waves crashing in the tide and a local fisherman casting his 12 foot pole, the eve was saturated in beauty.









GOD'S GRANDEUR
Gerard Manley Hopkins

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Hope in various forms

Pope Benedict XVI has released the second encyclical of his Pontificate! Check out the goodness here:

http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20071130_spe-salvi_en.html

I started wondering about the definition of an encyclical. Alora, the answer:

A papal document treating of matters related to the general welfare of the Church, sent by the Pope to the bishops. Used especially in modern times to express the mind of the Pope to the people. Although of themselves not infallible documents, encyclicals may (and generally do) contain pronouncements on faith and morals that are de facto infallible because they express the ordinary teaching of the Church. In any case, the faithful are to give the papal encyclicals their interior assent and external respect as statements of the Vicar of Christ. (Etym. Latin encyclicus; Greek enkyklios, circular, general.)

An encyclical epistle is like an encyclical letter but addressed to part of the Church, that is, to the bishops and faithful of a particular area. Its contents may be doctrinal, moral, or disciplinary matters of universal significance, but may also commemorate some historical event or treat of conditions in a certain country or locality. (Compliments of www.catholicculture.org, one of the best Catholic resources out there.)


I've only had a chance to read a paragraph or two, but I hear it's fantastic. It's being added to the ever-growing booklist momentarily. Any good suggestions for the list? I'm on a Josef Pieper streak right now. St. Edith Stein's "Science of the Cross" is waiting on the sidelines. I could use some good fiction - ideally short stories - on there!

I probably won't be able to post again for a wee while. My friend Lucia is visiting from Slovakia for a week (yay!), the internet card we use randomly stopped working with my Mac, and I need to squeeze in a big chunk of communication knowledge into my brain before I come home for Christmas, which is in (drumroll!): 20 days! In the meantime, I listen to Charlie Brown's Christmas CD and James Blunt's latest and attempt to study, study, study . . . (translation: make pasta, make new blog posts, make myself guilty).

Please do keep my close friend Monika and her family in your prayers. Monika's sister passed away yesterday after a long and painful battle with cancer.

Beginning by Being

"Do you wish to be great? Then begin by being. Do you desire to construct a vast and lofty fabric? Think first about the foundations of humility. The higher your structure is to be, the deeper must be its foundation." Saint Augustine

Right before I came to Rome, I spread out a wee pile of books on my bed that I wanted to read or re-discover while I was in Rome. Dante's Divine Comedy, my textbook of Modern Philosophy, the Bible, Flannery O'Connor, Dostoevsky's Notes From the Underground, From the Gulags to the Killing Fields, Alexander Solzenitzen's anthology - they all made it into my suitcase. (All the credit for my newfound fascination with Russia goes to my last job). And then, in the interest of avoiding $250 in overweight fees, they all slowly came out. In my defense, I was planning on buying a new Bible here anyways.

I rationalized that I would have more than enough to do and read in Rome once classes got started. Which is true. But I am deeply grateful for the few that did make it - including I Believe in Love, On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs, and St. Augustine's Confessions. I'll have some more to say about the first two later. But for now, I feel like a proper tribute to Saint Augustine, and the fascinating history surrounding his church in Rome, is due.

I discovered Saint Augustine sophmore year in literature class. I remember the course itself focusing on the more philosophical aspects of his thought: such as why he stole that fruit with his friends when he had no intention of eating it. It's an interesting point of discussion, tied into the investigation of the workings of our will. But me being me, I simply fell in love with his style and his relationship with God. His probing self-analysis, his complete openness and his absolute dependence upon God struck a chord with my melancholic nature in a way that few other authors have. Here was a man who lived deeply, sinned deeply, who loved the wrong things deeply, and then took the sum of that life and transformed it by placing into God's wide hands: and then loved and lived in Him more deeply than ever before. His courage and the immense gratitude that directed his life has been a source of inspiration and joy to me ever since I first read those pages.

I brought out the Confessions on this year's plane ride to Rome, in between "Becoming Jane" and sips of much-needed-sleep-inducing sips of alcoholic content. I've been bumping into him often ever since. His Church in Rome, San Agostino, is located a convenient two blocks behind my school, and has become my favorite local church in Rome.

The ambiance of the shrine is breathtaking: gray stone and muted maroon and green marble; vibrant, lovely paintings and frescos, and a piercing blue celing that rivals that Rome afternoon sky. Being run by the Dominicans, it's one of the few Churches in Rome that feels as if it was constructed yesterday. No grime darkens the loveliness, and the lighting allows you to apreciate the art. On rainy Rome afternoons, the side chapels gleam.

Angels greet you upon entering:



The side chapels (Friday was a particularly gray day):



The side aisles with the sky-blue ceilings, which has to be my favorite architectural element in Rome:



A taste of the color scheme:



The history of San Agostino's parishoners is no less fascinating. According to my trusty Companion Guide to Rome, this church attracted the leading humanists and intellectuals of the 15th century day. Raphael and his crew considered this their home parish, and would attend Mass after they had recovered from "dining out in summer nights in the gardens of their friends. These feasts were renowned for witty conversation, the company of the most beautiful courtesans and extemporised verses and speeches." This period marked a time when humanists and artists blended together, or perhaps attempted to "baptize," pagan characters and Christian figures. "Today these poems read as the most extraordinary mixture of paganism and Christianity, with the Virgin and saints apostrophised as classical goddesses such as Juno or Venus; they were however in accordance with the current of the times and the joy in the newly re-discovered classical idea of beauty." I have to dig up some of those.

Courtesans also made San Agostino's their home parish. This fact was in my mind while I spent some time in the adoration chapel on Friday. Above the tabernacle hangs a painting depicting a saintly figure ascending to heaven to converse with two saints. On earth two figures, that of an annoyed looking devil and a particularly buxom and underclothed woman, look bored wearing chains. I assume the saint is Saint Augustine; I forgot to check the name of the Saint or when the painting was installed. But had it been present during the 15th century, I wonder how the courtesans reacted to it; if they recognized or identified with with the woman in the picture, and in which ways they rationalized their day-job as they came to worship in the church of the Saint who renounced their illicit offerings.

I end this lazy-Sunday-afternoon post with the most hauntingly beautiful passage Saint Augustine penned:

Late have I loved you, Beauty so ancient and so new,
late have I loved you!
Lo, you were within, but I outside,
seeking there for you,
and upon the shapely things you have made
I rushed headlong,
I, misshapen.
You were with me, but I was not with you.
They held me back far from you,
those things which would have no being
were they not in you.
You called, shouted, broke through my deafness;
you flared, blazed, banished my blindness;
you lavished your fragrance,
I gasped, and now I pant for you;
I tasted you, and I hunger and thirst;
you touched me, and I burned for your peace.