Photo of the Day: St. Andrew Kim Taegon Statue, St. Raphael's Church, Long Island City, NY

 

A post of mine earlier this month briefly summarized the history of St. Raphael's Church, a mainstay of Long Island City, NY for 140 years. But I left for a later date a discussion of the white statue in front of the church honoring St. Andrew Kim Taegon, a source of great interest and pride for the parish, especially its Korean congregants.

The son of Christian converts, St. Andrew studied in Macao before his 1845 ordination as a Roman Catholic priest—Korea’s first. He did not last long, falling victim to persecution by the Josean dynasty. He was only 25 when he was beheaded for his evangelism efforts a year later. Religious freedom would not be granted in Korea until 1883.

Fr. Andrew, together with 102 other Korean martyrs, was canonized by Pope John Paul II on a trip to the nation in 1984. He is now the patron saint of Korean clergy.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (First Letter of St. Peter, on Christians’ Obligations to Each Other)

“Above all, maintain constant love for one another, for love covers a multitude of sins. Be hospitable to one another without complaining. Like good stewards of the manifold grace of God, serve one another with whatever gift each of you has received.” —1 Peter 4: 8-10

The image accompanying this post is from a painting of the apostle by Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640).

Quote of the Day (Laura Miller, on Mystery Stories)

“In a detective story, the mystery both propels the plot and gives the sleuth license to venture into places and milieus where she doesn't typically belong. Who done it, then, is the secret that strips all other secrets of their sanctity. In the better mysteries, the solution also turns the world of the story inside out, revealing how things actually work behind the façade. And, in the best mysteries, the detective herself is cracked open and remade, sometimes even destroyed, by the truth. This points to another shortcoming of series detectives: their fans find their familiar methods and quirks comforting and would be disappointed if each book didn’t serve up more of the same.”— American journalist and critic Laura Miller, “Walk the Line” (review of Dennis Lehane’s Small Mercies), The New Yorker, Apr. 24-May 1, 2023

Quote of the Day (Ken Rosenthal, on Rob Manfred’s Pete Rose Decision)

“[Major league baseball commissioner Rob] Manfred is nothing if not shrewd. He surely did not want to risk the president embarrassing him publicly on social media. He also probably did not want to get on Trump’s wrong side at a time when he is pushing for a direct-to-consumer streaming service for the league, and the migration from broadcast to streaming by professional sports leagues is under government scrutiny. Also, while Trump is known to be pro-management, it's not out of the realm of possibility that, if sufficiently annoyed, he could threaten baseball’s antitrust exemption.”—Ken Rosenthal, sportswriter for “The Athletic,” on the decision to remove Pete Rose from MLB’s “permanently ineligible” list, in "Hall Must Weigh 4,256 Hits Against a Heap of Questions," The New York Times, May 15, 2025

Two decades ago, as many entertainers raised their voices against the Iraq War, a Laura Ingraham book popularized unsought advice that right-wingers offered progressives who were, to their way of thinking, sticking their noses where they shouldn’t: Shut Up and Sing.

These days, many Americans are likely to co-opt the first two words of Ms. Ingraham’s title and hurl them at President Trump. 

Prior Presidents, too busy with affairs of state, never felt the need to comment 24/7 on so many non-governmental areas of life to which people, no matter their parties or ideologies, retreated for relief.

Consider this just one more precedent, one more norm broken wide open by the current administration.

Don’t imagine that such blustering and blundering will end with the case of baseball’s all-time hits king (who, it has come out, also sought to score with a teenager in the Seventies, at a time when he was married with two children).

This week, former Death Row Records head Suge Knight predicted that Trump could pardon Sean “Diddy” Combs if the rapper is convicted at his current trial.

In that case, will Rose fans—will Trump fans—continue to excuse the President’s intrusions in areas that should not concern him?

Flashback, May 1975: ‘Seven Beauties’ Scores With Pitch-Black Satire on the Death Camps

With the world premiere of Seven Beauties in France in May 1975, Lina Wertmüller not only maintained the buzz surrounding her since Love and Anarchy three years before, but reached what turned out to be her career zenith.  

No other filmmaker had created such a brand of biting, individually rendered satire since Preston Sturges’ run of Hollywood comedies in the early 1940s.

Then, like Sturges, Wertmüller made the mistake of releasing a movie that didn’t make money—and found her critical cachet as depleted as her box office grosses.

Even notoriously acerbic movie critic John Simon hailed her in a New York Magazine cover story as “The Most Important Film Director Since Ingmar Bergman." 

Such was the acclaim and attention that she became the first female to be nominated for a Best Director Oscar with this film, briefly reminding Hollywood that women had been at the forefront of industry back in the silent era.

Her iconoclastic views on class, sex, and politics in The Seduction of Mimi, Love and Anarchy, and Swept Away—all featuring Giancarlo Giannini as an antihero—set the stage for this latest triumph, at a time when loosened censorship made these topics a matter of incessant debate among cinephiles.

What made her work so compelling—and, at the same time, flummoxed many viewers—was Wertmuller’s refusal to fit neatly into an ideological box. Professedly a socialist, she gravitated more toward anarchism. (Pedro, a philosophical concentration camp inmate, echoes the director’s belief that “A new man in disorder is our only hope.”) Though a trailblazing female director, she evinced little interest in feminism.

The filmmaker’s creative methods were as unconventional as her subjects. The supercharged, slapstick energy of the films of her prime derives from her early training in the Italian commedia dell'arte form, characterized by extensive improvisation.

Most of the film’s scorn is directed at Giannini’s Pasqualino Frafuso, a small-time Neapolitan hood sarcastically nicknamed “Seven Beauties” for the group of homely sisters whose honor he continually boasts of protecting.

Flashbacks detail how his foolish machismo lead him to kill one sister’s pimp, fall into the hands of the police (right after boasting loudly that he’d never be taken alive), fake insanity to avoid jail, volunteer for service in Mussolini’s army when he fears he will go crazy with other lunatics, desert from the Eastern Front, and find himself in a German concentration camp. He is now face to face with the question: how far will he go to survive?

That turns out to be desperately far: first, when he decides to seduce the grotesque, pitiless female camp commandment, then when given charge of fellow inmates—including with responsibility for selecting who will live and who will die.

The lesson that Wertmuller drives home—that the horrors of Fascism become possible not just by political criminals who seize control of the state, but by the supine complicity of ordinary citizens—comes early in the film, when Pasqualino and fellow army escapee Francesco stumble upon Nazi soldiers perpetrating a massacre against helpless prisoners in an open field.

Carefully hiding while watching helplessly from a distance, Pasqualino and Francesco debate what they could have done. Francesco says that they are accomplices in the atrocity: “We didn't make a sound, didn't come out and spit in their faces.”

Nothing doing, Pasqualino counters: that would just be a “useless suicide.”

But Francesco persists: “No, it wouldn't have been useless because in the face of certain things you've got to say no, and instead I said yes to Mussolini, to duty, and to all that crap.”

As demonstrated in Maureen Orth’s October 1975 profile in Newsweek, Wertmuller indulged her penchant for non-professional actors by including the American journalist (originally on a brief leave of absence as her assistant) and her mother among the extras as a prostitute and her madam.

Like mentor Federico Fellini (for whom she worked on 8½), she sought unusual, sometimes grotesque, faces. Moreover, she often preferred visual to verbal instructions forgoing a translation of her remarks to the American actress Shirley Stoler, saying, “I don’t care if she understands what I say, I just want her to imitate what I do.”

Despite its considerable critical acclaim, Seven Beauties has not lacked detractors, then or now. Like Wertmuller’s prior films, it featured graphic violence (including rape, which has troubled many feminists who would otherwise champion her work).

Although its depiction of the Nazi death camps is grim, its tone veers as often into the satiric as the sorrowful. In the opening minutes, grainy black-and-white images of World War II contrast with a sardonic male voice-over intoning, “Oh, yeah” two dozen times (“The ones who vote for the right because they're fed up with strikes. Oh yeah. The ones who vote white in order not to get dirty. The ones who never get involved with politics. Oh yeah.”)

The repetition feels much like the “so it goes” mantra that Kurt Vonnegut used to comment on the senseless carnage of that conflict in Slaughterhouse Five.  The sequence is a necessary prelude to understand how Pasqualino will exhibit the amoral survival instincts of a cockroach.

Furthermore, though the Nazi victims onscreen include political dissidents and deserters, none are specifically identified as Jewish, even though that group was the major target of Nazi extermination schemes. That fact is all the more surprising given that Wertmuller based her screenplay on an Italian-Jewish death-camp survivor who, like Pasqualino, killed his sister’s pimp—and whom she even cast as an extra.

Seven Beauties opened in broader release around the world in the fourth quarter of 1975, giving it exposure for Oscar consideration. In the end, the film came away with four nominations (including for Wertmuller and Giannini) but no wins. (Even in the Best Foreign Film category, it lost to Black and White in Color.)

For a while, it seemed that Wertmuller’s white eyeglasses would become as synonymous with Italian cinema as Fellini’s Borsalino fedora. Hollywood even came calling, courtesy of a four-film contract she signed with Warner Bros. But after the failed English-language A Night Full of Rain (1978), the studio canceled the remaining three projects.

The filmmaker returned to Italy, making 16 more films for the big screen—each one progressively more strident and less available in America than the last. 

Yet the likes of Jane Campion, Sofia Coppola, Kathryn Bigelow, and Greta Gerwig owe her a debt for making manifest the possibilities inherent in a female director’s vision—and Hollywood recognized that contribution by awarding her an Honorary Award, at age 91, for her career in 2019, two years before her death.

With Eurocommunism in fashion in the year of the release of Seven Beauties, few could have predicted the end of Marxism as a viable force. But fewer still could have guessed that far-right nationalism would stage a comeback in Wertmuller’s Italy a half-century later, let alone that it would enter the United States.

That situation makes viewing Seven Beauties far more disturbing today than it was at the time. Its opening minutes of World War II footage immediately connect an ignorant, benighted, machismo-dominated populace to life in a dictatorship.

Thinking, a socialist tells Pasqualino while the two are awaiting prison, is “the most atrocious crime a citizen could commit.” In the present state of democracies worldwide, thinking is as dangerous as Wertmuller’s political prisoner suggests, but also as much of an absolute necessity.

TV Quote of the Day (‘30 Rock,’ Anticipating a Current Tech Bro)

Jack Donaghy [played by Alec Baldwin]: “Think like a robot. Be logical and dispassionate.”

Liz Lemon [played by Tina Fey]: “Are you okay?”

Jack: “See, that's exactly what I'm talking about. Human empathy. It's as useless as the Winter Olympics.” — 30 Rock, Season 4, Episode 4, “Audition Day,” original air date Nov. 5, 2009, teleplay by Tina Fey and Matt Hubbard, directed by Beth McCarthy-Miller

Empathy—or, as Elon Musk put it, in a podcast interview with Joe Rogan in late February, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”

And, to answer Liz Lemon’s question above, about both Jack and Elon: No, they’re not okay. Their responses tell you why.

Quote of the Day (Victor Hugo, on ‘The Paradise of the Rich’)

“The paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor.” — French novelist-poet Victor Hugo (1802-1885), The Man Who Laughs (1869)

Quote of the Day (Edna Ferber, on Why ‘The Creative Writer is Rarely Alone’)

“The creative writer is rarely alone. The room in which one works is peopled with the men and women and children of the writer’s imagination.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright Edna Ferber (1885-1968), A Kind of Magic (1963)

Quote of the Day (Anna Quindlen, on Old Friends)

“The thing about old friends is not that they love you, but that they know you. They remember that disastrous New Year's Eve when you mixed White Russians and champagne, and how you wore that red maternity dress until everyone was sick of seeing the blaze of it in the office, and the uncomfortable couch in your first apartment and the smoky stove in your beach rental. They look at you and don't really think you look older because they've grown old along with you, and, like the faded paint in a beloved room, they're used to the look. And then one of them is gone, and you've lost a chunk of yourself. The stories of the terrorist attacks of 2001, the tsunami, the Japanese earthquake always used numbers, the deaths of thousands a measure of how great the disaster. Catastrophe is numerical. Loss is singular, one beloved at a time.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist and novelist Anna Quindlen, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake: A Memoir of a Woman's Life (2012)

The image accompanying this post of Anna Quindlen, Barnard College ’74, was taken Jan. 29, 2008 (when she was head of the school’s board of trustees) by Angela Radulescu.

Tweet of the Day (meghan@deloisivete, on Faxing)

“My mom asked what my office does for faxing since we're completely remote, so I had to tell her we're actually located in 2024.”— meghan@deloisivete, tweet of July 2, 2024

The image accompanying this post—a Panasonic Thermotransfer Fax KX-F90 with integrated answering machine and telephone, beginning of 1990s—was taken Jan. 14, 2006, by Pittigrilli.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. Augustine of Hippo, on Faith, Hope, and Love)

“When, then, we believe that good is about to come, this is nothing else but to hope for it. Now what shall I say of love? Without it, faith profits nothing; and in its absence, hope cannot exist. The Apostle James says: ‘The devils also believe, and tremble.’ — that is, they, having neither hope nor love, but believing that what we love and hope for is about to come, are in terror. And so the Apostle Paul approves and commends ‘the faith that works by love’; and this certainly cannot exist without hope. Wherefore there is no love without hope, no hope without love, and neither love nor hope without faith.”— Roman Catholic memoirist, theologian, and bishop St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD), The Enchiridion: Being a Treatise on Faith, Hope and Love, translated by Professor J. F. Shaw (1883)

Quote of the Day (Emily Dickinson, on a ‘Helpless’ Personal Victory)

“When I am not at work in the kitchen, I sit by the side of mother, provide for her little wants—and try to cheer, and encourage her. I ought to be glad, and grateful that I can do anything now, but I do feel so very lonely, and so anxious to have her cured. I hav'nt repined but once, and you shall know all the why. While I washed dishes at noon in that little ‘sink-room’ of our's, I heard a well-known rap, and a friend I love so dearly came and asked me to ride in the woods, the sweet-still woods, and I wanted to exceedingly—I told him I could not go, and he said he was disappointed—he wanted me very much—then the tears came into my eyes, tho' I tried to choke them back, and he said I could, and should go, and it seemed to me unjust. Oh I struggled with great temptation, and it cost me much of denial, but I think in the end I conquered, not a glorious victory Abiah, where you hear the rolling drum, but a kind of a helpless victory, where triumph would come of itself, faintest music, weary soldiers, nor a waving flag, nor a long-loud shout. I had read of Christ's temptations, and how they were like our own, only he did'nt sin; I wondered if one was like mine, and whether it made him angry—I couldnt make up my mind; do you think he ever did?”—American poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), May 7, 1850 letter to friend Abiah Root

Robert Frost wrote of the impact of personal choices in “The Road Not Taken.” One hundred and seventy-five years ago this week, as the above passage indicates, an earlier New England poet, Emily Dickinson, found herself at a threshold she couldn’t cross.

In American literature, few figures are more enigmatic than “The Belle of Amherst.” I have been particularly interested in her since a visit to the Dickinson Homestead in town nearly 20 years ago (which I discussed in this 2008 blog post).

Though 1,000 of her letters survive, her younger sister Lavinia, at her request, destroyed the rest of her correspondence. So the secret chambers of her heart remain locked, despite the curiosity of residents in her Pioneer Valley community during her lifetime and of biographers and literary critics in the nearly 140 years after her death.

Maybe I should have inserted “largely” before “locked” in the last sentence. After coming home from Mount Holyoke Seminary (later Mount Holyoke College) in her teens, she engaged in a brief period of social activity until age 24 in her family’s original home on North Pleasant Street: going to dances, calling on friends, and attending book club readings and concerts.

It was during this time—before her family repurchased and moved back into the home her grandfather lost to bankruptcy, the one we now know as the Dickinson Homestead—that she confided in her close Amherst Academy friend Abiah Root about the “great temptation” she avoided.

Why didn’t Dickinson join the male friend who “who asked me to ride in the woods,” despite wanting “to exceedingly”? 

Could she have suspected his intentions, even as she felt drawn to him, because of his strenuous importuning (“he said I could, and should go")? 

Despite her refusal to join others in Amherst in the “Second Great Awakening” sweeping New England in the antebellum period, did she still feel the restraints of religion that urged pre-marital chastity?

I suspect another cause, hinted at in the very first sentence: the obligations of family, in this case her mother.

Emily Norcross Dickinson, already 45 years old at this point, was a chronic invalid who suffered from postpartum depression. She went on to live another 32 years—only three years before her daughter. 

But her condition worsened in time, until a stroke in 1874 necessitated even more constant care, far beyond her daughter’s earnest initial attempts to “provide for her little wants—and try to cheer, and encourage her.”

Alfred Habegger’s 2001 biography of the poet, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books, discusses her midlife deep attachment to Otis Phillips Lord, an elderly jurist and friend of her father whose marriage proposal she seriously considered.

But I can’t help wondering if the point of no return for her came years earlier, when she decided to resist a tug on her heart by a far younger man—whose identity, all these years later, has never been established. 

In 1856, while Abiah Root was urging her to come visit and meet her husband, Dickinson was resisting not just the responsibilities of marriage but even the freedom to step outside the Dickinson Homestead.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Get Smart,’ With a Desperate Moment for Max and Company)

Hathaway, the villain with an eyepatch [played by Eric Brotherson] [pointing a gun at Max, the Chief and 99]: “Only one question remains: who goes first?”

Maxwell Smart [played by Don Adams]: “Eh, you haven't volunteered for anything lately, Chief...”— Get Smart, Season 3, Episode 10, “That Old Gang of Mine,” original air date Dec/ 2, 1967, teleplay by Phil Hahn and Jack Hanrahan, directed by Norman Abbott

Quote of the Day (P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, on the ‘Sheer Variety’ of Popes Throughout History)

“Seventy-eight [popes] have been declared saints as well as, oddly enough, two antipopes; eight have been pronounced ‘Blessed.’ There have been seventy-seven Roman popes, one hundred Italian, fourteen French, eleven Greek, six German, six Syrian, two Sardinian, two Spanish, two African, one English, one Dutch, one Portuguese, and one Polish. Fifteen have been monks, four friars, two laymen, and one a hermit. Four have abdicated, five have been imprisoned, four murdered, one openly assassinated, one deposed, and one subjected to a public flogging. One died of wounds he received in the midst of battle, and another after a ceiling collapsed and fell on him. The sheet variety of the ways they began and ended is riveting in itself."— Scottish historian P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, Chronicle of the Popes: The Reign-by-Reign Record of the Papacy Over 2000 Years (1997)

Well, there is some limit to the variety of pontiffs, which you can see immediately in the accompanying composite photo: all aging white men.

Still, Maxwell-Stuart’s overall point is well-taken. Here are some updates on the helpful statistics above, as of yesterday:

*five popes have abdicated;

*83 have been declared saints;

*seven were German;

*one was Argentine;

*one is American.

Like his predecessors, Pope Leo XIV—the former Robert Francis Cardinal Prevost—will face immense challenges preaching the Gospel in a world increasingly hostile to its message of brotherhood, preserving the unity of the Church, and reaching out to other religions. He deserves our prayers, even as he prays for us.

One thing is for sure: he is likely to confound expectations, just as his predecessors back to and including Pope John XXIII did.

Appreciations: Ernest Hemingway’s Tale of Early Fascist Italy

“On the flat road we passed a Fascist riding a bicycle, a heavy revolver in a holster on his back. He held the middle of the road on his bicycle and we turned out for him. He looked up at us as we passed. Ahead there was a railway crossing, and as we came toward it the gates went down.

“As we waited, the Fascist came up on his bicycle. The train went by and Guy started the engine.

" ‘Wait,’" the bicycle man shouted from behind the car. ‘Your number's dirty.’

“I got out with a rag. The number had been cleaned at lunch.

" ‘You can read it,’ I said.

" ‘You think so?’

“ ‘Read it.’

" ‘I cannot read it. It is dirty.’

“I wiped it off with the rag.

" ‘How's that?’

" ‘Twenty-five lire.’

" ‘What?’ I said. ‘You could have read it. It's only dirty from the state of the roads.’

" ‘You don't like Italian roads?’

" ‘They are dirty.’

" ‘Fifty lire.’ He spat in the road. ‘Your car is dirty and you are dirty too.’

" ‘Good. And give me a receipt with your name.’

“He took out a receipt-book, made in duplicate, and perforated, so one side could be given to the customer, and the other side filled in and kept as a stub. There was no carbon to record what the customer's ticket said.

" ‘Give me fifty lire.’

“He wrote in indelible pencil, tore out the slip and handed it to me. I read it.

" ‘This is for twenty-five lire.’

" ‘A mistake," he said, and changed the twenty-five to fifty’

" ‘And now the other side. Make it fifty in the part you keep."

“He smiled a beautiful Italian smile and wrote something on the receipt stub, holding it so I could not see.

" ‘Go on," he said, ‘before your number gets dirty again.’"—American novelist, short-story writer, memoirist, and Nobel Literature laureate Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), “Che Ti Dice La Patria?”, in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition (1987)

I had never heard of “Che Ti Dice La Patria?” until I saw it mentioned in the preface to the Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. It is not one of the more anthologized of the Nobel laureate’s tales—nor, based on my experience in high school and college, one of the more assigned titles in American literature courses.

But it is of a piece with some of his other classic fiction—and, given the world’s slide back into revanchist nationalism and authoritarian, more relevant than at any time since World War II.

It’s hard to read its early sentences without thinking of the longer, more symbolic, and more famous first chapter of A Farewell to Arms. It has the same close attention to natural description, and the same sense of wondering what is to come:

“Outside the villages there were fields with vines. The fields were brown and the vines coarse and thick. The houses were white, and in the streets the men, in their Sunday clothes, were playing bowls. Against the walls of some of the houses there were pear trees, their branches candelabraed against the white walls. The pear trees had been sprayed, and the walls of the houses were stained a metallic blue-green by the spray vapor. There were small clearings around the villages where the vines grew, and then the woods.”

The road that the two American travelers, the unnamed narrator and “Guy,” use is “not yet dirty”—an irony that will reverberate at the end of the story, when the road’s cleanliness and maintenance become a point of contention.

The first Fascist party member is anxious to hitch a ride with the Americans because, despite Il Duce’s boast that he “made the trains run on time,” transportation in his regime remains haphazard. His condescension is pronounced enough that the narrator tells Guy, “he will go a long way in Italy.”

The two travelers stop for a meal in the Ligurian city of La Spezia, with the woman waiting on them wearing “nothing under her house dress”—a waitress doubling as a prostitute. Uneasy, Guy asks if he has to allow the woman to wrap her arms around him. “Certainly,” the narrator responds sarcastically. “Mussolini has abolished the brothels. This is a restaurant.”

The shakedown by the bicycle-riding, revolver-wielding Fascist that concludes the quote at the start of this post illustrates the petty abuses that filter down even to the lowest levels of an unaccountable dictatorship.

Readers at the time of its publication in 1927 in The New Republic could have been forgiven for questioning if the piece was fact or fiction. I myself wonder, even now particularly after learning that Hemingway had driven through Spezia with a friend named “Guy” (Hickok, a foreign correspondent for the Brooklyn Eagle), on his way to obtain a record of his baptism after being wounded in WWI—a document that enabled him to wed Pauline Pfeiffer in the Roman Catholic Church.

One thing is for sure, though: with each Italy-related work of Hemingway’s’ in the Twenties, his contempt for the harm that Mussolini was inflicting on the nation was growing apace. He had come to regard the dictator as a strutting liar with a dangerous appetite for power through his stint as a reporter for Toronto Daily Star (including an interview in which the newly installed dictator claimed ominously that “the Fascisti are now a half a million strong” and “have force enough to overthrow any government that might try to oppose or destroy us”).

Mussolini, the young writer noted acidly, had a “genius for clothing small ideas in big words.”

In 1929, with his WWI novel, A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway’s account of the retreat from Caporetto would fly in the face of official propaganda that refused to acknowledge this unmitigated military disaster. In the same chapter, his description of the carabinieri—the country’s arbitrary, vicious military police---seems colored not just by their actions during the war but by their misconduct starting in 1922 as Mussolini’s paramilitary force for suppressing dissent.

Quote of the Day (Matthew Aucoin, Redefining ‘Classical Music’)

“Western classical music is an unusual case. The reference point for a given piece of music is the score, rather than a studio recording or a live performance. Beethoven's symphonies have been recorded hundreds—if not thousands—of times, and they’ve been performed more times than that, but every one of those performances and recordings refers to the same scores. For a composer, the score is the foundational site of creativity, and the act of score-making links together artists who could hardly sound more different from one another—say, an Italian composer of the late Renaissance and early Baroque period like Claudio Monteverdi and a 20th-century American avant-gardist like John Cage…. If we let ourselves be guided by this basic question—which musical artists regard the score as a creative starting point?—we arrive at the broadest and most welcoming definition of ‘classical’ music.”—American conductor and composer Matthew Aucoin, “What Is Classical Music?”, The Atlantic, May 2025

The image of Matthew Aucoin accompanying this post was taken Apr. 22, 2022, by Beehivesspaghetti.

Quote of the Day (Conrad Aiken, on Seeking an Elusive Word or Name)

“You know, without my telling you, how sometimes
     A word or name eludes you, and you seek it
     Through running ghosts of shadow,—leaping at it,
     Lying in wait for it to spring upon it,
     Spreading faint snares for it of sense or sound:
     Until, of a sudden, as if in a phantom forest,
     You hear it, see it flash among the branches,
     And scarcely knowing how, suddenly have it.”— American Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, short-story writer, novelist, and critic Conrad Aiken (1889-1973), The House of Dust: A Symphony (1920)

Quote of the Day (Anna Akhmatova, on How ‘Something Miraculous Burns in Music’)

“Something miraculous burns in music;
as you watch, its edges crystallize.
Only music speaks to me
when others turn away their eyes.”—Russian poet Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966), “Music (For Dmitri Shostakovich),” in The Stray Dog Cabaret: A Book of Russian Poems, translated by Paul Schmidt (2006)

Media Blowing Smoke About Papal White Smoke

“It is a familiar saying around the Vatican that ‘he who goes into a conclave a pope comes out a cardinal.’ It is considered bad form to openly promote a papal candidate, even worse to appear to be campaigning for the job. Traditionally, to be considered a front-runner is almost a guarantee of failure. Yet that has never stopped Vatican observers from compiling lists of papabili—cardinals considered to be ‘popeable.’ The current lists are heavily dominated by Italians.

“No Americans are among the papabile. Modern popes generally have come from countries with little political or military power. If an American were elected, says [Jesuit priest and author Thomas] Reese, ‘people would think the election was fixed by Wall Street or the CIA.’”— Jeffery L. Sheler and Eleni Dimmler, “The Next Pope,” US News and World Report, May 11, 1998

As I’ve gotten older, I have increasingly delighted in coming across past analytical journalism to see how well they predict what will come to pass. For all the hours these scribes devoted to their beats, you’d be surprised how many flunk this basic test.

This US News and World Report article from a quarter-century ago is a good case in point. It took another seven years after its publication before Pope John Paul II died. In that time, he appointed several dozen cardinals. Just as important, several were of such an advanced age that they were no longer considered papabile by the end of his pontificate. Some were even too old even to vote by this time.

Few fields lend themselves less to such thumb-sucking exercises as papabili prognostication. Reporters look at the Roman Catholic Church, see an institution whose dogma has changed little, all things considered, over the centuries, and believe that they can scope out which cardinal will ascend the throne of St. Peter.

As far as I’m concerned, they’ve been blowing smoke about the white smoke at the end of these conclaves for years. Somehow, though, it feels worse with the one that will start on May 7 to replace Pope Francis.

I chuckled when I read the line in the above quote about how the trail of unsuccessful front-runners “has never stopped Vatican observers from compiling lists of papabile.” Precisely—the US News and World Report piece was doing just that!

My question: have Vatican insiders been compiling these to guide their personal selections for the next pope—or to amuse themselves as they take languid lunches with journalists desperate to please their bosses back home?

In many respects, I part company with the neoconservative author George Weigel and his brand of ultra-traditional Catholicism. He notes, for instance, that notwithstanding efforts by Francis to broaden Church governance, he was “the most autocratic pontiff in centuries.” Really? While Weigel might not be guilty of heresy, he certainly is of hyperbole—so much so that you couldn’t even get a devil’s advocate to argue his case convincingly.

Even so, I must agree with three points he makes in his Wall Street Journal analysis from a week ago about the upcoming conclave:

*“The cardinal-electors don't really know each other”;

*Popes, even with their appointment of many cardinals, can’t control the election of their successors;

* “Every conclave is a unique micro-environment, psychologically and spiritually.”

Considering these three points, why are so many people foolhardy enough to think they’ll know what will happen?

The speculation about the winner at the conclave has become ridiculous. A combined $17 million have changed hands on the prediction markets Polymarket and Kalshi, according to Alexander Osipovich’s article in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal.

Complicating all of this even further is the misleading lens through which the media interprets the factions within the Church in general and the conclave in particular. Whatever divisions exist in the hierarchy—and they are real—they don’t neatly align with Democratic and Republican policies.

For all their orthodoxy on sexual issues, for instance, Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI were largely indistinguishable from Pope Francis on matters of war and peace and their deep skepticism of unrestrained capitalism.

So there is a strong possibility that whoever is selected at the end of this process will fulfill neither the greatest hopes nor worst fears of those watching the proceedings with burning interest.

I hope—no, I pray—that the cardinals conclude their deliberations swiftly. I just don’t think I can take much more of this ill-informed silly season.

Quote of the Day (Joe Queenan, on How He’s Using His Time Not Watching the 76ers in the Playoffs)

“The time I haven't wasted watching the NBA has allowed me to start taking piano lessons and to polish off the first volume of Shelby Foote’s epic ‘The Civil War.’ I am already up to Antietam and pretty much in control of the A major chord. I know that Robert E. Lee wasn’t much of a strategist, that McClellan was a little old scaredy-cat and that everybody persistently underestimated Honest Abe. What’s more, I can now play ‘Shall We Gather by the River?’"—Humor columnist Joe Queenan, “Moving Targets: The Joy of My Team Missing the NBA Playoffs,” The Wall Street Journal, Apr. 26-27, 2025

Houston Rocket fans will undoubtedly want to employ the same strategy—and, unless a huge upset is pulled off in this coming round against the Boston Celtics, so will the Knick faithful like myself.

Photo of the Day: St. Raphael's Church, Long Island City, NY

Over a month ago, I happened to be walking in Long Island City when I spotted from afar the spire, 150 feet high, of what turned out to be St. Raphael Catholic Church.

Though the parish was founded in 1865, it wasn’t until 20 years later that the current brick-and-sandstone structure was completed. The demographics of the parish—largely Irish and German immigrants in its early years—have changed markedly. Estimates for language speakers are one-third each now for English, Spanish, and Korean.

This Day in Theater History (‘Ernest in Love,’ Musical Adaptation of Wilde, Opens Off-Broadway)

May 4, 1960—They’ve made musicals from the grimmest possible subject matter, so what’s wrong with adapting a great English comedy as light as a souffle? That, evidently, was the thinking behind Ernest in Love, which transformed The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde into a clever musical that premiered in New York at the off-Broadway Gramercy Arts Theatre.

Sixteen years ago, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Eugene O’Neill’s only comedy, Ah! Wilderness, had, a half century before, been turned into a musical: Take Me Along. The company that mounted the revival, New York’s Irish Repertory Theatre, was also responsible for unearthing another musical that had faded out of popular consciousness over the years: Earnest in Love.

In the mid-to-late 1950s, it was possible to envision musicals taken from almost any source, mounted in almost any medium. Lerner and Loewe had struck it rich on Broadway by turning George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion into My Fair Lady, and Rodgers and Hart had crafted a musical especially for TV with Cinderella.

It was only a matter of time before someone had the bright idea of adapting another play by a witty Anglo-American playwright into a TV hour of song, Who’s Earnest?, that was shown on The United States Steel Hour in 1957. Someone then had the idea of expanding the show and taking it to the stage, which it did three years later.

The show’s creators, while accomplished songwriters, didn’t have the exalted pedigree of other musical creators of the time. 

Anne Croswell, responsible for the book and lyrics, had been a copywriter for the J. Walter Thompson and Leo Burnett advertising agencies, a television production assistant, and creator of the 1956 Democratic campaign song "Believe in Stevenson" for penning Who’s Earnest? and Huck Finn for The United States Steel Hour. 

Composer Lee Pockriss, a frequent collaborator with Croswell, had received a Grammy nomination for the Perry Como hit, "Catch a Falling Star.”

Critics applauded the show for its droll lyrics and for retaining Wilde’s whimsical plot and dialogue, but few people left the theater humming the songs.

Ernest in Love was quickly overshadowed by another Off-Broadway musical that premiered the day before its debut, The Fantasticks, which in its original run went on for another 42 years. Even after moving to the Cherry Lane Theatre, Ernest totaled 111 performances.

Luckily, an original-cast recording was released a month and half later. That has helped to ensure that the musical would not go completely unnoticed since then, with productions by professional, college, and community theaters. But there’s always been a sense of it being dusted off, even unearthed, whenever someone gets around to it.

Croswell and Pockriss, then in their thirties, lived into the new millennium, but never had a major success on the Broadway stage. Their closest shot, Tovarich, a 1963 star vehicle for Vivien Leigh, could not sustain its run past six months once the talented but troubled actress suffered a nervous breakdown at a matinee.

Though Croswell continued to write shows produced in smaller venues like Connecticut’s Goodspeed Opera House for another few decades, she was not seen again on the Great White Way once her 1968 musical, I’m Solomon, closed after seven performances—a legendary flop that, playwright and screenwriter William Goldman estimated, lost between $700,000 and $800,000.

As for Pockriss, he went on to have his share of hits (e.g., Shelley Fabares’ “Johnny Angel”), much-heard children’s songs in the 1980s for Sesame Street, and a 1970 musical adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby that never made it to production. But another novelty song of his continues to reverberate in my mind: “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini.”

Whenever the latter tune pops up on oldies stations, it’s always too soon for my taste. Someone who felt similarly was director Billy Wilder, who featured it in his 1961 Cold War satire One, Two, Three as the music that the East German police used to torture a suspected spy.

Just think: Within a year, falling from Oscar Wilde to “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini.” It’s even worse than going from writing Frasier or The Gilmore Girls to Married With Children. It may have provided royalties for the rest of Pockriss’ life, but all the same…

Spiritual Quote of the Day (David Brooks, on the Pagan Ethos and ‘The Callous Tolerance of Cruelty’)

“The callous tolerance of cruelty is a river that runs through human history. It was dammed up, somewhat, only by millenniums of hard civilizational work. The pagan ethos — ancient or modern — always threatens to unleash brutality once again. The pagan ethos does not believe that every human was made in the image of God, does not believe in human equality, is not concerned about preserving the dignity of the poor. It does not care much about the universal feelings of benevolence, empathy and faithfulness toward one another, which, it turns out, are absolutely required for a democracy to function.”—Columnist David Brooks, “How to Survive the Trump Years With Your Spirit Intact,” The New York Times, May 2, 2025

Even without David Brooks naming Donald Trump within the first few paragraphs of this article, one would have guessed that the attributes that the columnist lists for “the pagan ethos”—"power, manliness, conquest, ego, fame, competitiveness and prowess”—have been projected by the President. All of these are the exact antithesis of the humility and charity that Pope Francis practiced daily.

All the more infuriating, then, that Trump posted to Truth Social an AI-generated meme of himself depicted as the pope. The act was so outrageous, even for him, that many social media users, even those who loathe him, refused to credit it at first, demanding proof.

By now, it’s hopeless to expect the President to recognize that this image has needlessly offended thousands of people, let alone apologize for it. As former GOP National Committee chairman Michael Steele has noted, the post just demonstrates “how unserious and incapable [Trump] is”—a 78-year-old acting like a 10-year-old.

No, my disappointment is with fellow Catholics, like Vice President J.D. Vance, who pass this episode off as a joke, handing Trump a moral get-out-of-jail-card they never would have provided Barack Obama and Joe Biden if they had pulled a similar stunt.

To its credit, the New York State Catholic Conference swiftly and correctly condemned the post, disputing that there could be anything “clever or funny about this image.”

“We just buried our beloved Pope Francis,” the statement continued, “and the cardinals are about to enter a solemn conclave to elect a new successor of St. Peter. Do not mock us.”

I would not be surprised, however, if Cardinal Timothy Dolan stays silent, preferring to hide behind this institutional statement and the need to prepare for the upcoming conclave. As I noted in this prior post, he never came to the defense of The Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde when Trump tweeted that she was “nasty” for urging him in January to display compassion for undocumented immigrants and the LGBTQ community.

My guess is that, like prominent lawyers and universities that have knuckled under to Trump’s legal threats, Cardinal Dolan will fear the President’s “retribution”—as un-Christian a behavior as one can imagine.

Quote of the Day (Laurie R. King, on Persistence, ‘The Most Common Characteristic of a Successful Writer’)

“Persistence is the most common characteristic of a successful writer; the refusal to take ‘no’ for an answer. But also, keep learning. Keep reading other writers, to see how they do things. Keep thinking about the craft, and how you might do things better. Keep writing for the joy of the thing, not for what you're being told the market wants. But mostly, keep at it.”—American crime and science-fiction novelist and short-story writer Laurie R. King, asked for advice for aspiring writers, quoted by Andrew F. Gulli, “Interview: Laurie R. King,” The Strand Magazine, Issue LXXII (2024)