Venice-Art-Tours Blog

English notes and a wedding...

First the wedding of my step-daughter, Sinead Graham, to Edward Titheridge, near Brighton on 22 March. See proud mother and happy and beautiful bride. Bride and groom off to Africa, done deal. God Bless! Bravi Sinead, Ed, and Laurie. ...The wedding required our 6 day stay in cold Brighton which afforded us time for pre-wedding and post wedding parties, plus visits to the Pavillion and to Jane Austen's house in Chawton. Sadly, the numerous second-hand bookshops in Brighton which we frequented 11 years ago are all gone. But numerous curries, unavailable in Venice, and properly made fish and chips restored us to mental health.

Notes on the continued decline of the United Kingdom, or... there will not always be an England, that is certain.

Idiocy 1:

There was a report in The Daily Telegraph (22 March), that a public school fired its senior nurse, Susan Pope, because she smacked her 10 year old son, on his bottom (he wearing trousers) at home after he was abusive and refused to stop swearing at her. This smacking  was witnessed by her 15 year old son who promptly phoned the police to rat on his mother. The police duly arrived and arrested the mother and the father who both spent 32 hours in the slammer. Her employer, the public (private to American readers) school then fired her.  Mrs Pope said,"Smacking is not against the law in this country and I am a firm believer of physical chastisement within reason". "My son was behaving badly and I warned him if he swore at me again I would smack him." The police put the two children's names on the Child Protection Register which is an indictment of the parents.The school felt it had to protect its reputation and fired the nurse. Would you send your son to that school now?  I hope Mrs Pope gets lots of job offers. Sic transit gloria...

Idiocy 2:

The Sunday Telegraph's education correspondent reports this: Pupils as young as 10 are sitting on interview panels and rating teachers as part of the government's plan to give them a "voice" in schools. Children in thousands of primary schools have been drafted to interview new teaching staff. Also, one in ten schools allow pupils to formally rate teachers' lessons. These ratings are used in evaluating the teachers' performances. The government says that giving pupils a "say" in how the schools are run is part of the (socialist-labour) government's "Every Child Matters" agenda. As one of the teachers put it, "The lunatics have taken over the asylum."

Idiocy 3:

In Brighton we walked by a hair stylist salon which advertised in its window: extensions, weaves, straightening, etc.  Also, it advertised hair services for "Euro, Afro, and those of mixed parentage" (italics mine). So I guess one cannot use the word race in England. "Mixed racial parentage" is what they meant to say. But race as an adjective is equally abhorrent, apparently.To say "mixed parentage" is to state the obvious, man and a woman, tall and short, blond and brunette, stupid and smart, blue eyes and brown...but apparently the race word is verboten in England's green but unpleasant land.

Coda: A US acquaintance visited Venice a month or so back and saw numerous Nigerian bag sellers hawking their counterfeit Pradas on the street. He said, "Hey, look at all those African-Americans selling bags".

Basta.

   

Venice and other items...

Palm Sunday...On the way to church this past Sunday we walked through the Piazza S Marco as we usually do. It was 10AM and we happened to catch the procession of palms by the cardinal of Venice, bishops, clergy, and the parishioners of the Basilica S Marco. While processing the length of the Piazza, all were singing hymns which were amplified by portable loudspeakers. It was quite moving. The photo here shows Cardinal Scola, he wearing wearing a mitre. The palms carried were six feet long, whole branches, very impressive.  Our palm Sunday is 20 April so we have to wait, drat.

Judy Stires of Bay Head, NJ and a Venice resident has passed away after a 14 month battle with cancer. She was 76 and was one of the most vibrant, active, generous, upbeat and funny people we have ever met. She loved people and always spurned the Venetian ex-pat habit of gossiping, making her unique here. We have fond memories of her here in Venice and in the US. She leaves behind dozens and dozens of friends and we shall not see her likes again. We pray for her soul and also for Sidney and their children.

The good news is that we have gone to contract for the sale of our retreat in the Italian alps. See pic. We sold it because we found that we hardly ever retreated to it, alas. The first 2 years we did so 8 times a year, but, thereafter, the frequency diminished. So we sold it; took two years. Below is a view from the veranda and of the chalet itself perched on the side of the mountain. Seemed like a good idea at the time.

And what about Obama and Reverend Wright? Because Obama says he never heard Wright deliver racist, anti-American rants, is it, therefore, logical that Obama can exonerate himself from hiring him as an advisor and admiring him? Is this the logic that got Obama through law school or the LSATs? Obama did not know Wright held the view that America had 9-11 coming? How can this be? Hey, Obama, read his parish newsletter.

Can this man be president? Here's Obama with Sharpton. Says a lot about the company this man keeps. Obama should return to local community service. Soon.

Meet Novelist Peter DeVries...

Of course, some of you may already know him. Peter DeVries (1910-1993) worked as an editor for Poetry Magazine but mostly for the The New Yorker. He is chiefly remembered for his very funny (and serious) novels written from the late 40's through the 80's. His novels have an existentialist vein and he allows us to feel the irony and ambiguity which characterises living in the 20th century, especially suburbia, his milieu. He is always trying to square, in an dark humourous way, the absurdity of life while being born into God's creation. To quote him, "If God loves us, why is he giving us such a hard time?" As dark as the books are, they are immensely entertaining. He provides laugh out loud epigrams, reversals, and witticisms while exploring the puzzle of existence and how to best for us to come to terms with it. To him, the answer seems to be to soldier on.

DeVries scores against fundamentalists as well as against liberal ministers, one of whom in a book, made divorce a sacrament in his church… to enhance inclusiveness. He is passionately interested in man's relationship with God in  its ambiguities and degrees of belief and unbelief; but to me he often seems to want to believe, despite his dark moments. He doth protest too much. His novels examine marriage, parenthood, suburban living, sex, in ordinary middle class situations...and the books are very entertaining. Aphorisms and observations abound; here are a few:

• The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe.

• The bonds of matrimony are like any other bonds - they mature slowly.

• Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign something is eating us.

• Life is a zoo in a jungle.

• Let us hope, that a kind Providence will put a speedy end to the acts of God under which we have been laboring. (after a series of floods in one of his novels).

• It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.

• The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.

• We are not primarily put on this earth to see through one another, but to see one another through.

• Parenthood: when I can no longer bear to think of the victims of broken homes, I begin to think of the victims of intact ones.

• Writing: I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.

• Words fashioned with somewhat over precise diction are like shapes turned out by a cookie cutter.

• The satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive and eventually releases him again for another chance.

• There are times when parenthood seems nothing but feeding the mouth that bites you.

• Celibacy is the worst form of self-abuse.

• DeVries likens the war between the sexes to two French nobleman fighting  a duel on  a battlefield upon which bombs are raining.

Here are DeVries’ twenty six novels (out of print but available through secondhand book websites):  But Who Wakes the Bugler? (1940), The Handsome Heart (1943), Angels Can Do Better (1944), The Tunnel of Love (1954), Comfort Me With Apples (1956), The Mackeral Plaza (1958), No, But I Saw the Movie (1959), The Tents of Wickedness (1959), Through The Fields of Clover (1961), Blood of the Lamb(1962), Reuben, Reuben (1964), Let Me Count the Ways (1965), The Vale of Laughter (1967), The Cat's Pajamas and the Witch's Milk (1968), Mrs. Wallop (1970), Into Your Tent I’ll Creep (1971), Without a Stitch in Time (1972), Forever Panting (1973), The Glory of the Hummingbird (1974), I Hear America Swinging (1975), Madder Music (1977), Consenting Adults, or The Duchess Will be Furious (1980), Sauce for the Goose (1981), Slouching Towards Kalamazoo(1983), The Prick of Noon (1985), Peckham's Marbles (1986).

This is a man you should read. I recommend starting with The Mackeral Plaza.

To learn more, here are a couple of links to articles on DeVries:

http://www.westportmag.com/media/Westport-Magazine/April-2006/The-Return-of-Peter-DeVries/.

http://theologytoday.ptsem.edu/apr1975/v32-1-article1.htm

Photo courtesy of Westport Magazine.