Lenten Stuff

It's Annunciation Eve (so I'm getting in a bit of anticipatory blogging), and I wish I knew more about the solemnities that fall in Lent (that is, from the point of view of how "Lenten" a celebration ought to be: feasting and fasting are both important, but hardly combine well).

Between evening meetings and losing my voice for a fortnight, reading out the Imitation in modern Dutch has been a slow business. We've only just got to book I, chapter 13, and a passage that could have been written for me:

Some are kept safe from great temptations, but are overtaken in those which are little and common, that the humiliation may teach them not to trust to themselves in great things, being weak in small things.

Thursday last week the cardinal came and gave a lecture at the parish I help out in, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of its foundation. He speaks very well, and says very sensible things. His pastoral letters, his lectures, his essays and his sermons always contain, and convey, so much wisdom. How have things come so badly unstuck on his watch? You wonder why someone so sensible seems so reluctant to do anything about it.

On a lighter note, looking for material to illustrate a lecture on (among other things) the BSE crisis, I came across this rendition of Roast Beef of Old England:



Hardly Lenten fare. But Fielding: what a genius!
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"Vote with your body": must try that

One afternoon a couple of years ago (after sitting in on a seminar on Husserl: a namedrop that will set the tone) I was enjoying a coffee on the terrace of a café just outside the gates of Cardinal Mercier's Higher Institute of Philosophy, and chatting to some American philosophy students. I'd bought an anthology of Dorothy Day's writings that morning, and spotting it one of them recommended Utah Phillips to my attention.

Although I'm drowning in translations and lecture prep at present, I did want to share these snippets off youtube, fruits of my just-before-bed substitute for television (which is becoming just too dire to contemplate). Two years ago there was only the hilarious Moose Turd Pie: there's been a Utah Phillips explosion on youtube since.

"If Dorothy Day would be standing right here on this stage now, that wonderful woman, if she was standing right here and looking at you with those piercing black eyes, I know exactly what she'd say because I've heard her say it ..."


And a 20th-century folksong, The Trooper's Lament:

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