#but i do think it's interesting nonetheless. (roman) catholics who try to go on about acceptance and diversity and unity within the church | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

manuscripts-dontburn · 3 years

Photo

D: A Tale of Two Worlds

Author: Michel Faber

First published: 2020

Pages: 304

Rating: ★★★☆☆

How long did it take: 5 days

I would not hesitate to put this book into the hands of any child and that, I believe, is the biggest praise for a children's book. Unfortunately for me as an adult reader some things simply did not reach their potential. Perhaps it is my own fault for not having read anything by Dickens yet (aside from The Chrismas Carol), but references may have flown over my head. The story itself is a bit too straightforward and the adventure itself, while not without its moments (among which the best is the episode in the creepy hotel), extremely simplistic - and yet never explained in a satisfactory manner. The questions of why and how and for what purpose are not answered and while that may not be necessary to a child who can simply cheer Dhikilo on, it doesn't satisfy an older reader.

The Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

Author: Neil Price

First published: 2020

Pages: 624

Rating: ★★★★★

How long did it take: 8 days

Achievement of research, choice of topics and compulsively readable writing.

Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

Author: Mary L. Trump

First published: 2020

Pages: 225

Rating: ★★★★☆

How long did it take: 2 days

In spite of what you may think while going into this book, it is neither a Donald Trump biography neither a deep psychological study of his deranged personality. It is partly a memoir and partly a family portrait drawn by a person who is, in a way, inside and yet, in another way, left out of that family. Mary L Trump reveals a lot about the toxic relationships which ran and still run throughout the Trump clan, who are pretty much just a bunch of extremely mediocre, uninspiring people who got lucky and got blinded by greed. I swear that if I read about a fictional family like theirs I would dismiss it as completely unrealistic, but yet there they were, rich and privileged and disgusting. There is nothing shocking revealed about Trump himself, we have all seen his insecurities, his failures, his lies and cruelty, but it was nonetheless interesting to see where exactly has all that come from. And yet, none of the explainings makes Trump any more likeable or worth of pity.

Navzdory básník zpívá

Author: Jarmila Loukotková

First published: 1957

Pages: 510

Rating: ★★★★☆

How long did it take: 9 days

Po dlouhé době jsem ochutnala českou klasiku a ačkoliv Villon jako postava mi k srdci nepřirostl, nelze než obdivovat Jarmilu Loukotkovou, její vládu nad jazykem a schopností vykreslit tak rozporuplnou osobnost. Především však je nutné ocenit jak hluboce (vysoce?) atmosférická tato kniha je, středověk z ní vyloženě dýchá.

The Way Past Winter

Author: Kiran Millwood-Hargrave

First published: 2018

Pages: 256

Rating: ★★★★☆

How long did it take: 2 days

This could have been much, much longer. There were so much material, themes and character development to work with! But if I try and be less subjective, I need to judge this book as it was intended to be: for pre-teen children. And in that case, I have nothing to criticize. This is a story about family ties, dressed up as a chase-and-discover adventure with some genuinely exciting and some genuinely dark parts. And as usual with Kiran Milwood Hargrave, it is beautifully written.

Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire

Author: Peter H. Wilson

First published: 2016

Pages: 1008

Rating: ★★★★★

How long did it take: 10 days

This beautifully executed and designed book is a real undertaking. I decided to go with an audiobook (funnily enough narrated by a guy called Napoleon) and I am glad of it because otherwise, I would be reading this until the next year. That said this is an excellently researched and presented study of the Holy Roman Empire, its justice system, its nationalities, its ambivalent relationship with the Catholic church and many other aspects. I imagine it would work best as a reference book. But just for the sheer amount of work that went into it I have to give it the highest rating.

My Cousin Rachel

Author: Daphne de Maurier

First published: 1951

Pages: 335

Rating: ★★★★★

How long did it take: 8 days

The way Daphne du Maurier plays with feelings, thoughts and motivations is masterful, as is the language she uses. Loved this.

Vita Nostra

Author: Marina & Sergei Dyachenko

First published: 2007

Pages: 416

Rating: ★★★★☆

How long did it take: 2 days

I have a massive headache and feel like I´m on drugs after finishing this book. I went into it under a false notion of it being sort of a "Harry Potter" magical school sort of book. A little further on I thought: OK, so it is Harry Potter meets The Secret History. On crack. By the time the second part rolled by my head was spinning. There is not really anything I could liken this to, it stands completely on its own. There is not much to talk about in regards to the plot: A young girl is, under rather shady circumstances, forced into attending an obscure school in a small town and her studies slowly but surely completely take over her entire existence. However, the atmosphere created, the steps she takes and her changing mindset are all fascinating to follow. Even though the protagonist starts at 16 and ends up as 19 years old, this is far from the typical "YA" as you can imagine. The campus life, for all the bizarre things going on around it, feels raw and absolutely real - complete with countless beer bottles, stolen soaps and knickers drying on the heater. I was uncomfortable with one of the main protagonists being referred to as "hunchback", even though we knew his name (this later disappears for... reasons which I won´t spoil) and I was also uncomfortable with the teachers openly encouraging our main character to lose her virginity the moment she turned 18 because apparently, that makes you more magic (simplifying here a LOT, but it was CREEPY and unnecessary). Then again the whole school was build on "weird" and "creepy" and the book manages to make the reader queazy and uncomfortable quite a lot. The ending almost flew over my head - unless you know certain things you will be completely lost - but in a very strange way... I found it oddly satisfying. I would recommend this to people whose buzz words include: dark academia, authentic campus life, pretentious philosophy, character-driven and "REALLY weird".

Hamlet

Author: William Shakespeare

First published: 1603

Pages: 159

Rating: ★★★★☆

How long did it take: 1 day

Finally can tick this off of my TBR. I respect and appreciate Shakespear rather than like him and that is all I am going to say.

Dangerous Alliance: An Austentacious Romance

Author: Jennieke Cohen

First published: 2019

Pages: 448

Rating: ★★☆☆☆

How long did it take: 4 days

Look, if I were 13 I would probably really enjoy this one. There is nothing exactly wrong with it and if you want something you do not need to use your brainpower for, go ahead. Unfortunately, I am 30-something reader with hundreds of books behind me, not to mention sarcasm for blood. So I found it on the whole dull and forgettable. Let´s just leave it at that.

#booklr #wrap up #January 2021

4 notes · View notes

apenitentialprayer · 4 years

Note

Hi, are there any catholic theology books you could recommend? I really want to dive deeper into my faith and be ready when somebody tries to bad mouth Catholicism or spread false information. I feel like I should know more than I do? Idk if that makes sense😅

I’m not sure how many books I can recommend that are straight up theology, but I’ll recommend a few, sure! I’m going to start with two that I haven’t actually read yet but have heard good things about; after that, I’ll talk about books I have read and can confirm. First, all of my siblings were given this book the years of their Confirmations; Joe Paprocki’s The Bible Blueprint: A Catholic’s Guide to Understanding and Embracing God’s Word, which is pretty much exactly what it says: a guidebook to learning how to read Scripture. It explains how Catholics view the Bible to be structured, explains different interpretive lenses Catholic theologians have used in analyzing the texts, and ways to quickly locate and reference passages. Likewise, I have heard good things about Matthew Kelly’s Rediscovering Catholicism: A Spiritual Guide to Living with Passion and Purpose, which attempts to bring the essentials of the faith into one easy to read book. I’m looking at the table of contents of my copy now, and among the subjects that the book covers is the basic philosophy of Catholicism, an attempt to describe how to live out an authentically Catholic life, and the practices that are the pillars of a Catholic’s spiritual life. As I have already said, I haven’t read this book, but I have read another of his (which I will recommend next), so I can confirm he is a clear writer. Onward to what I have read.... Matthew Kelly also wrote The Biggest Lie in the History of Christianity: How Modern Culture is Robbing Billions of People of Happiness. A very click-baity title, I know. But the book nonetheless has what I thought was a life--changing idea; that as saints in the making, we shouldn’t be worried about the fact that our lives are not continuous streams of holiness. Rather, what makes a saint a saint is that they seize the chance to make moments holy as the opportunities present themselves. Kelly tries to explain how to find those moments where grace presents itself in our lives, and choose to act on those moments. Not so much theology as Christian living, but still, a good (and quick) read. Hilda Graef wrote two books that I am a huge fan of. The first is titled Adult Christianity, and its primary objective is to elaborate on a worldview beyond the “God is the king in the sky who rules all of creation” image. The book tackles the subjects of what it means to believe in a transcendent God, the use of symbolism in religious language, the significance of Christ and how we encounter Him spiritually and in the personhood of our neighbors, and suffering, death, and resurrection. The other one she wrote is The Commonsense Book of Catholic Prayer and Meditation, which talks about the nature of Catholic prayer, the pitfalls many Catholics fall into, and some suggestions concerning methods and guildelines, as well as elaborations upon Eucharistic theology, the cardinal virtues, and praying alongside the liturgical calendar. G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy: The Romance of Faith isn’t really theology in the normal sense of the word, but it nonetheless represents a very important worldview in that it beautifully explains the sense of wonder faith can bring. As the title suggests, Chesterton saw faith primarily through the lens of romance and adventure, and so he emphasizes the fantastical, the paradoxical, the heroic, and the revolutionary elements of Christianity. This is less of an intellectual discussion on Christianity, but more about the mood that faith is capable of producing. Hilaire Belloc wrote a book called The Great Heresies; as the name gives away, it isn’t so much about Catholicism as many of the great movements that have challenged Catholicism (Arianism, Islam, Albigensianism, Protestantism, and Modernism). Nonetheless, what Belloc does is use the differences between Catholicism and these movements to talk about the philosophical underpinnings of these competing theologies. My biggest takeaway from this book is that even seemingly small theological differences can created profoundly different worldviews. I’m going to give you one more modern author before I take a step into the past; Caryll Houselander is the author of one of my favorite books, The Passion of the Infant Christ. This book is important for its concept of the inscape; essentially, the world is patterned after the Life of Christ, which itself is patterned after the Passion of Christ. It’s a good introduction to the concept of typology, but beyond that we have a book with a special reverence for the sacramental aspect of our faith, as well as some profound insights on the Eucharist and how each individual is a mother of the Christ-life. I don’t think I can overestimate how impactful this book was on me. Okay, so now books from the early Church Fathers, which you can find online. I’ll provide links for all of these. The first is one that literally everyone will recommend you; The Confessions of Augustine of Hippo. The book is structured as an autobiography, the story of how Augustine ultimately found the truth of and joined the Catholic faith. It talks about his experiments in philosophy and religion, his relationship with his mother, and the tensions he experienced in his attempts to find God while living a life of fornication. Interspersed throughout are his own observations and thoughts about the nature of God, humanity, sin, and salvation. (X) You might also be interested in his City of God, which is a massive door-stopper of a book that is part Biblical commentary, part history of the world as told through a theological lens, and part defense of Christianity against angry pagans. (x) After that, I’d recommend Athanasius of Alexandria’s On the Incarnation, which provides a short outline of the fall of humanity and its redemption through God’s decision to assume human nature. Athanasius talks about not only why the Incarnation happened, but also how this helps to solve the problem of sin and redemption, and argues against certain arguments made by detractors. (x) Justin Martyr’s First and Second Apologia are two short works that try to justify Christianity in the eyes of the pagan society that he was addressing. He tries to explain some of the similarities between Christian and ‘heathen’ mythology, attempts to show how the great pagan philosophers anticipated Christ in their writings, and provides arguments for how Christians have improved life in the Roman empire. (X, X)

#asks #Catholicism #Christianity #Hilda Graef #Hilaire Belloc #G.K. Chesterton #The Romance of Faith #Caryll Houselander #The Passion of the Infant Christ #Confessions #Saint Augustine #Saint Athanasius #Justin Martyr

25 notes · View notes

nsfwviolets · 4 years

Text

hello everyone !! my name is ally & i hail from the est timezone. i really should be studying for my exam tomorrow or at least trying to get some rest but here i am !! i don’t think anything has really changed about vi but everything you need to know about her is under the cut !! & like always, please like this post so i could bother you for plots !!

❛ new york’s very own violet lennox was spotted on broadway street in jimmy choo thigh high boots. your resemblance to taylor hill is unreal. according to tmz, you just had your twenty-third birthday bash. while living in new york, you’ve been labeled as being avaricious, but also enticing. i guess being a gemini explains that. three things that would paint a better picture of you would be elongated limbs tangled in pink silk sheets, the lingering smell of yves saint laurent mon paris, & oversized faux fur coats draping sun kissed shoulders ( cisfemale & she/her ) + ( ally, 21, she/her, est )

basics ;;

full name: violet ( soft & sweet ) faith ( unquestioning belief and complete trust in god ) lennox ( northern irish / scottish last name ).

nicknames: vi, v.

age: twenty-three.

birthday: 18 june 1996.

zodiac: gemini.

gender: cisfemale.

pronouns: she / her / hers.

sexual orientation: bisexual.

nationality: american.

hometown: aspen, colorado.

parents: diane galindo ( brooke shields ) & richard lennox ( rob lowe ).

siblings: older sister.

pet(s): one year old miniature labradoodle named tate.

religion: roman catholic.

height: 5′10.

occupation: victoria’s secret angel / instagram model / socialite.

positive traits: honest, loyal, passionate, responsible, authentic, affectionate, reliable, kindhearted, & courageous.

negative traits: loud, manipulative, stubborn, materialistic, selfish, abrasive, hypocritical, insecure, & dramatic.

hobbies: shopping, audrey hepburn movie marathons, traveling, being the center of attention, photography, spontaneous dance parties, working out, massages, doodling, pilates, online shopping, & journaling.

habits: interrupting someone mid sentence, excessive hair tucking, shoulder rolling, lip biting, & impatiently tapping her heels or acrylic nails when she is at a loss for words & or annoyed.

labels: the vixen & the babydoll.

aesthetics: silk dresses, lip gloss, the deafening sound of designer heels making contact with marble floors, lipstick stained coffee mugs, matte nail polish, glitter, diamonds, snow days, satin sheets, impulsive shopping sprees, romantic comedy binge watches, ocean waves, lolita, bright lights, day drinking, champagne for breakfast, iced matcha, lingerie as outerwear, yves saint laurent mon paris perfume sprayed on the nape of her neck & her decolletage, lavender oil, acrylic nails, snow blanketing trees, hardwood mahogany floors, hgtv reruns, vintage chanel, pretty in pink, rose gold accents, bubble baths after a long day, half naked pictures, & rose water.

style inspo: taylor hill, kylie jenner, candice swanepoel, josephine skriver, kendall jenner, blair waldorf, & cher horowitz. here are just a few examples of her wardrobe !! ( x x x x x ) muse inspo: brooke davis ( one tree hill ), cher horowitz ( clueless ), blair waldorf ( gossip girl ), gabrielle solis ( desperate housewives ), lydia martin ( teen wolf ), fallon carrington ( dynasty ), sadie saxton ( awkward ), lauren cooper ( faking it ), mini mcguinness ( skins ), holly golightly ( breakfast at tiffany’s ), maddy perez ( euphoria ), brooke maddox ( scream ), samantha jones ( sex & the city ), tahani al jamil ( the good place ), jackie burkhart ( that ‘70s show ), naomi clark ( 90210 ), cece parekh ( new girl ), cassie howard ( euphoria ), madison montgomery ( american horror story ), jenna maroney ( 30 rock ), kelly kapoor ( the office ), elle woods ( legally blonde ), rachel green ( friends ), paris hilton, & mona-lisa saperstein ( parks & recreation ).

background ;;

violet faith lennox is diane galindo’s & richard lennox’s youngest child. born three weeks early on 18 june 1996 at aspen valley hospital in aspen, colorado. the very moment they held their daughter ( who they lovingly referred to as a ‘ blessing ‘ ) in their open arms, they knew that their family was finally complete.

her mother ( diane ) is her parents’ pride & joy. as the eldest daughter of wealthy wall street executives, she has done nothing but make her family proud her entire life. growing up, her dream in life was to help her father’s business but her career quickly changed course when she decided to pursue a career in medicine. the new york native eventually ended up going to harvard medical school in boston, massachusetts where she would end up meeting her future husband. to this day, dr. galindo is one of the most recognizable names in medicine & is world renowned for her work as a reproductive endocrinologist ( fertility specialist ).

her father on the other hand ( richard ) was born to an influential family in los angeles, california. from an early age, he was exposed to the spotlight due to the fact that his own father was governor of california & hoped to become president one day. however, things seemed to go off course the day the former governor was caught in his own cheating scandal all while being married to a former pageant queen. scandal erupted when the politician not only cheated on his stunning wife with a young secretary but when his mistress announced to the world that she was pregnant. the entire news circuit covered this affair for months & the governor resigned from his position when news broke that he urged his mistress to get an abortion.

following the scandal, the family fell out of the public spotlight. they spent years trying to repaint their public image after it was tarnished for nothing but selfish desire. approximately ten years later, the family made news again but this time about their newly found faith in god joining the long list of religious right wing politicians. richard’s father felt as if the only way to redeem himself was to devote himself to god. after years of distancing themselves from the catholic church, the family dove right back in which became the start of their fundamental catholic values that ruled every aspect of their lives.

as the only son in the family, richard’s parents had high expectations for him. however, he seemed to have different plans for himself that didn’t involve making his family proud or practicing what they preached. as an undergraduate student at yale, his interests were far & few between. his days only seemed to consist of sleeping with random women & binge drinking to his heart’s content. he knew that he didn’t have to be an astounding student because he had a giant trust fund waiting for him at home. but after a drunk driving accident that resulted in a 40 year old woman’s hospitalization & his own arrest, richard knew he had to clean up his act.

he eventually followed his family’s lead & became an ultra religious catholic. he even managed to boost up his grades & get an academic scholarship to harvard law school where he met diane. diane didn’t come from a strong religious background. in fact, she liked to tell people that she only believed in science & didn’t have faith or trust in a superior figure. but when she met a young richard lennox, her entire world was turned upside down. she let him into her life, converted to catholicism, & the two got married after three years of dating. flash forward to 1992. the married couple is moving to aspen, colorado for diane’s new job at an upscale hospital. they even received a generous check from richard’s parents to buy a mansion in the mountains !!

life for the couple in colorado was serene. they eventually welcomed their first child into the world ( a daughter ) & a few months later, their families moved to help them raise their children. both diane & richard always wanted a big family due to their catholic faith. they both agreed they would stop after 6 kids, however, their minds were quickly changed when she became pregnant with violet.

her pregnancy was extremely difficult to say the least. between being on bed rest for months & frequent hospitalizations, she didn’t know if she could do this again. on top of her own health issues, she also had problems with her unborn child. there was even a night where they thought they would lose violet after diane experienced unexplainable bleeding & her fellow colleagues at the hospital couldn’t detect a heartbeat.

luckily, they were able to find a heartbeat after 6 minutes of deafening silence & hushed prayers for a miracle. after that night, they knew that their daughter was a blessing which is why they agreed to give her the middle name faith which symbolizes their unrequited devotion to god.

eventually, violet was born !! she was born three weeks early & spent a week in the icu but overall she was healthy. she was a bit underweight but she was miraculously healthy. but after everything the family had been through, they decided that violet would be their last child.

as a child, violet did every thing her parents had asked of her. their faith played a large role in her upbringing which is why she spent every sunday inside of church.

by the time she was 8 years old, her family decided to move to new york city due to the fact that her mom received a prestigious job on the upper east side. at the age of 8, violet was already a competitive gymnast who’s likes included spending time with her family, competing, & going to school. even then she knew she could do everything she loved in another state which is why she didn’t put up much of a fight when she was told that they would be moving across the country.

moving from snowy open colorado to the upper east side of manhattan was definitely a culture shock for violet even at an early age. nonetheless, she eventually got used to new york city life & to this day she doesn’t think she would survive a week in colorado.

even after she moved to a new part of the country, violet remained devoted to gymnastics & her family. she had dreams of one day going to the olympics for gymnastics & everyone who knew her saw her potential. she even competed in world events & became a household name !! although, her parents often emphasized that school & religion come first which is why they made her & her sister attend a private catholic school all the way through high school.

in high school, she was a classic goody two shoes church girl. she was a strong student who received perfect grades in order to please her parents. for the longest time, she didn’t have time for anything other than school & sports but that changed by the time she was 16.

despite attending an all girls school, violet met her first boyfriend through one of her mutual friends. & like all stereotypical teen romances, it was love at first site. she was so infatuated with him that she was willing to put everything in her life on the back burner in order to focus on him.

& by the time she was 18, she received numerous academic & sports scholarships to prestigious colleges. however, violet decided to take a gap year in order to spend more time with her boyfriend of two years. she knew that she would eventually go to college but she wanted to make some time for herself first. her parents weren’t exactly happy about her decision due to the fact that she has big shoes to fill but they eventually came around the idea & were even happy for their daughter & her wholesome catholic boyfriend.

during her gap year, they spent an entire year traveling the world. they went to bali, greece, peru, brazil, iceland, dubai, thailand, argentina, & morocco. throughout the course of the year, violet documented her travel on her instagram & other social media platforms which is when she started gaining a lot of followers who wanted to watch her travel the world with the love of her life. before her influx of instagram followers, not a lot of people outside the world of gymnastics knew who she was. people of course knew who her parents were ( a famous doctor & lawyer ) but the world did not really know who exactly violet lennox was.

by the end of her gap year violet already had over 1 million followers on instagram !! & she was already getting paid doing what she loves which is travel the world. & since all of this happened during her year off, violet ended up telling her parents that she didn’t want to go to college which damaged their relationship as a result.

since her parents were so unsupportive of her decision to not go to college & ultimately quit gymnastics, violet ended up moving out of her house & moved in with her boyfriend at only the age of 19. & because her parents were completely unsupportive of her decision not to attend college, they cut her off financially & she was forced to make a living for herself. by this point, her career as a social media influencer was booming so she was already making a lot of money just through promoting detox teas, teeth whitening kits, etc.

it may seem as if life for violet was perfect by this point despite her falling out with her parents. however, that was not the case. even though she fooled the entire world by thinking that she had a perfect relationship, her boyfriend was incredibly abusive towards her & had been ever since the two started dating. although he was never physically abusive, he was mentally, emotionally, & verbally abusive. for years violet made excuses for him & blamed herself for their problems which only made her feel more miserable than she already was. this was her first real relationship & she genuinely thought that they were destined to be together even though she was severely unhappy.

he would constantly cheat, manipulate her, make fun of her appearance & insecurities, & wouldn’t let her do anything without his permission. the two were together for three years & there even was a time where violet became pregnant but quickly had an abortion without him knowing as soon as she found out. just three months after living together, she finally found the courage to break up with him. although it wasn’t easy at first, she’s thankful that she finally got out of a dangerous relationship. she also understands the dangers of social media better than anyone else because she fooled the world into thinking that she was in a happy loving relationship when that was far from the truth.

when violet told the world about their breakup ( most likely in an instagram live or an instagram story ) she ended up losing millions of followers. the majority of her followers only followed her to watch her travel the world with her boyfriend so once they found out that they were no longer together ; they didn’t see the point in following her anymore.

for an entire year following her breakup, violet began to spiral out of control. she started using drugs, alcohol, & partying as coping mechanisms in order to help her move on & forget about everything she had endured. that of course didn’t work but that didn’t stop her from partying every single night of the week & ending up in a stranger’s bed. eventually, she even leaked her own sex tape & naked pictures to the press in hopes that the press coverage would help make up for the millions of followers she lost on instagram.

& as she expected, the world would not stop talking about her sex tape for months. she gained the most followers she has ever done & eventually she got real modeling jobs as a result of her popularity. she hasn’t exactly told the world that she was the one who leaked the 20 minute video but everyone in their immediate circle knows she did it & also knows that she has other videos lying around for ‘ emergency ’ situations.

however, her parents cut off all contact with her following her scandal & it is still something that cuts deep two years later. she tells herself & everyone around her that she doesn’t need a family but everyone knows that’s a lie. it’s just a lie she keeps on telling herself to feel better about herself.

she became the youngest victoria’s secret angel at the age of 20 !!

she is also the youngest global ambassador for lancôme & ralph lauren !!

although she has become more of an actual model rather an instagram model, she still stays loyal to her social media platforms which is why she has over 100 million followers.

she lives a happy life after being so unhappy for so long but she still seeks her parents approval even though they have no contact with her.

personality ;;

for someone who is incredibly smart, she pretends to be dumb sometimes. she doesn’t think that guys like smart girls so she dumbs herself down. but she could also be a ditz at times ( unintentionally ).

she likes to think of herself as approachable but she also knows that she can be intimidating. nonetheless, she tries to be nice to everyone who comes her way unless they say the wrong thing to her & then she switches on her mean girl switch that comes far too easy for her.

even though violet is a lot to deal with, she is a nice person !! although she does have a flair for the dramatics & denies being dramatic all the time. she also likes to think of herself as a ‘ good girl ’ even though she is far from one. she loves sex & isn’t afraid to shy away from that but she still tells people that she’s good or an angel because it makes herself feel better about herself.

she also goes to confession 1-2 times a week to pray for her sins in order to get into heaven. she thinks with the amount of adultery she commits on a daily basis she needs to pray for her sins otherwise she won’t go to heaven & she thinks she looks way better in white than in red.

if you do her wrong, she will go out of her way to make your life a living hell. she is incredibly protective over the people in her life so she will do just about anything for them including berating people. revenge might as well be her last name !!

she may be loud and unnecessary at times but she is kind hearted and does mean well. even if she does have a bad way of showing it at times.

miscellaneous ;;

since she comes from a strict traditional upbringing, she was taught that being anything other than straight is wrong. so when violet first started experimenting with girls & even developed feelings for one, she told herself that she was going to hell. this is one of the reasons why she has not come out of the closet or has even come to terms with her sexuality. she denies all past same sex encounters & relationships which isn’t healthy. but since her parents disowned her following her sex tape, she knows that they would hate her more than they already do. if they ever found out that their daughter was anything but straight they would lose their minds & she’s still hoping that one day they could repair their relationship. apparently being bisexual is worse than having a sex tape !!

when she was a competitive gymnast for the united states national team, she was often put on strict diets in order to keep up. as a result of the strict dieting & unrealistic body images, violet developed bulimia as early as 12 years old. so when she quit gymnastics after deciding not to attend college, she was happy. she loved the sport but hated the pressure. even to this day, the sport isn’t actually sure what happened to her because she was an olympic hopeful. they all thought that she could have been the next gold medalist but she values her own mental health & sanity over a couple of medals. & even though she sought help for her eating disorder that reared ugly heads at times, she did slip up a lot while she was with her boyfriend who would make fun of her appearance. even now she isn’t 100% but she is better than she has ever been.

is extremely flirty & alluring.

violet also believes that the world revolves around her. many people may find her confidence to be annoying or superficial but she takes pride in it because it took her so long to learn how to love herself after being with her first boyfriend.

speaking of relationships, she’s terrible at them. she often runs away when things become too serious, manipulates the people she’s with, or breaks up with them for no reason. her logic is that she wants to hurt someone before they have the chance to hurt her. she still has yet to understand that the rest of the world isn’t like her ex but her past still haunts her every time she catches feelings.

she likes to tell people that monogamy isn’t the life for her which is why she prefers casual sex. she is also a proud sugar baby & has many sugar daddies !! most of them are old & married but she is a sucker for anyone who buys her nice things.

also has an instagram account for her dog !!

her most used emojis in her phone are the halo, the suggestive face, & the pink glitter heart.

she’s a gemini which means that she is expressive, quick-witted, sociable, and affectionate.

her favorite tv show is gossip girl.

her favorite movie is the notebook.

has a passion for photography but hasn’t explored it seriously. she understands that she makes a living off of being another pretty face but she also wants to explore other aspects of her career like photography & maybe even acting.

she often considers going to college or even going back to gymnastics a lot but she not made up her mind yet. she is happy right now as a model but she does miss aspects of her old life.as an instagram model, she is like kendall jenner or gigi hadid. in other words, she has a large following & people book her for photo shoots & fashion shows in order to boost their own notoriety because it looks better on their part. her walk is average at best but she does have a beautiful face. people hate instagram models working in the real modeling business as it is so they despise an instagram model with a sex tape !!

she lives in a townhouse in chelsea that has been featured in architectural digest twice. her home is filled with hardwood floors, marble, gold accents, & constantly smells like lavender.

the last concert she went to was lana del rey.

the last song she listened to was everybody loves you by charlotte lawrence.

the last show she binge watched was you.

the last movie that made her cry was tangled.

loves wellness shots after dogpound workouts.

gets daily massages by her french masseuse.

all & all, she is a mess but she loves the people in her life !!

here’s her pinterest board if you want to take a look !! i also have a wc page here that will most likely be updated over the weekend. & my discord is علياء#4067

#wealthyhq:intro #emotional abuse tw #eating disoder tw #abortion tw #hi #i def missed a lot #but kjhalsdf #love me anyway

16 notes · View notes

nikkiwriteswords · 5 years

Note

Hey there! I have a TUA theory that's been going through my head for weeks, and I'd love to hear what you think of it/if you can expand it in any way. Basically, I wonder if the powers the Hargreeves siblings have are somehow linked to the country they were born in. Luther, who has a Norther-European-sounding name, has a Viking's strenght, Klaus is from Austria/Germany, countries with a long history of wars (and therefore, death), Vanya is from Russia, homeland to great composers... (1/2)

(2/2)… a friend of mine suggested that Five could be from England, a country which used to control most of the world, because he can go wherever he pleases. I have a couple of ideas about the others, but I’m less sure about them. I’d love to get your feedback on this, and maybe hear your ideas! I think you do a magnificent job on your account (I literally opened my account today cause I couldn’t get enough of the content in your blog!) All the love, and thanks in advance!

Hey! Oh wow, thank you so much!! It makes me so happy to know people are enjoying my blog - so much so that you started your own, that’s amazing! I’m looking forward to seeing what you write: this is a great theory to start with, and I have had some ideas about the characters’ origins before, so let’s see what we can tease out of it: Now, let’s start by saying that we don’t have actual canon confirmation of the siblings’ origin and ethnicities (at least not that I can recall). For one, it’d be inaccurate to try and assume anything from the comics because the style is not true-to-life. However, what we can say is that Netflix’s casting choices for the show brought a much clearer diversity to our (anti)hero family. This is a good backlash against the prevalent whitewashing in tv and film (specifically Hollywood) of the last few years, but (1, is it diverse enough? and 2) it raises the question of how far we should read into the ethnicities of the cast as reflective of the characters. We must be careful not to 1) confuse comic canon with tv canon, and 2) conflate or assume things about a character identity based on assumptions about the actor/actress, unless they are qualities the cast themselves want to give their character. For instance, I’ve no idea if Cody Ray Thompson is Jewish, but he has confirmed (along with sharing a ton of other personal headcanons) that Dave was Jewish, based on Dave’s surname in on the dogtags. Meanwhile, Robert Sheehan disguises his Irish accent, therefore we can’t assume Klaus is Irish just because Robert is. Accent is a pretty big signifier, tbf, so this one is probably pretty obvious.

So what can we use as identifiers? Language cues, for one. Although it’s not conclusive evidence, we can theorise that Klaus knows a little German, and speculate that he wanted to feel connected to his German/Austrian heritage and distance himself from his upbringing. Therefore, from a linguistic perspective, names are also quite telling.

(They could have always been picked out of a hat, of course, but that’s no fun, and name meanings are so beautifully subjective.) This actually ties in with my own ideas on name analysis and what they can tell us about each character. (It’s in my drafts somewhere, but it’s only rudimentary so far). I was inspired when I saw this post [x]. What I had not considered, though, is how their heritage might be alluded to through their powers. The point about Russian composers is really interesting. Of course, other countries have great composers too, so how do we prove that link? If I had any classical music knowledge, I’d look through both the comics and the show for songs Vanya plays, or music associated with her in the show, or see if there’s any background details that could point to Russian composers in association with her character. Klaus, Germanic, means ‘victory of the people’. It originated from the Greek Nikolaos (coincidentally… so does Nikki. Just throwing that out there). It sounds heroic, but Klaus is decidedly anti-heroic for most of the first season. So perhaps we can interpret him as, quite literally, not living up to his name. Then there’s the elephant in the room: his untapped potential. Within that meaning, ‘victory of the people’, there’s connotations of conflict (and therefore death); revolution; the underdog rising up out of oppression. As Klaus does. Of course, if we’re talking about German heritage and conflict, we’ve got to mention WW2. There could be tenuous parallels to be made between Reginald and toxic ideologies like Nazism, and the outfit he wears as he stands in the door of the mausoleum did remind me of the uniforms of SS soldiers in Schindler’s List. But honestly, that would need fact-checking against reality, not another movie, and I don’t really want to touch Nazism any further than that without proper research. Nonetheless, I do wonder what the reaction would be to a man with a German name meeting a man with a Jewish name just 20 years after the end of WW2. However, I’d be more inclined to think about that name meaning again - victory of the people - and how it might allude to the Berlin Wall. But again, I’d need to research, because I know next to nothing about it. Could any of this explain his power to see the dead, though? If Klaus was intended to be Germany personified, specifically history of Germany wars and ideological conflicts, I’d say - it’s a stretch. There could be something there about carrying your past with you, learning from it instead of rejecting it, but it’s too vague. I also had brief thoughts on Luther. It is also a Germanic name, likewise derived from Greek, and means ‘soldier of the people’. In Greek, it derives from a word meaning ‘free’. Now, Luther is the conventional hero to Klaus’s antihero. (Does that place them on two sides of the metaphorical wall?) Where Klaus does not live up to his name, Luther does. He is the people’s soldier, with the strong moral conviction to protect and dish out justice. To that end, strength plays into that image. That said, I don’t know if there’s any signifiers from Luther’s character about his ethnic origins other than his name. However, the German theologist Martin Luther, founder of Lutheranism, is thought to be a key namesake for ‘Luther’. Martin Luther was seminal to the Reformation of the Roman Catholic Church, from which Lutheranism was born. Of course, the topic of religion might not relate directly to Luther, but the ideological crisis surrounding the Protestant Reformation - devote worship of a higher power, and a crisis of free will following challenges to predestination (all events in one’s life are predetermined by God) - could be equated with Luther’s crisis of faith in Reginald. All that being said, I also have a very vague recollection from my research that it also literally means ‘strong’. So. Mystery solved?As for Five, I really don’t think we can conclude anything that wouldn’t be pure headcanon. He’s an enigma, and is likely to stay that way. The only thing I can say is that his name - just a number - makes him elusive, hard to pin down, just like his powers. And, just a final thought: what purpose would it serve, to have heritage linked to powers? Sure, there’s the implication of the effect it has on identity as a whole, which is the underlying assumption of this entire post. But what else does it imply, to use these powers for good (or bad)? Global unification? We know that Hargreeves’s entire purpose for the Academy is to ‘save the world’, but even though they are facing down the apocalypse, the show makes it feel very personal, not universal. A family united.

23 notes · View notes

spytap · 6 years

Text

Italy 2017 - Part 4 of 4: ROME

Man, if Florence took longer than I expected, this is just gratuitously late. Nevertheless, we forge ahead.

Even with the experience of hindsight and time to consider, I worry that I don’t have really anything to say about Rome that isn’t superficial or repetitive. It was, for the most part, just as we expected it to be. That’s certainly not a bad thing, especially when meeting high expectations - but in a trip of such unexpected discoveries and deliciously surprising experiences, it stood out for being the city that was most like we thought it would be.

In my memory, I remember Rome as more closely related to the “real world” I inhabit in my “mostly LA with a fair dose of NYC” existence. Of all the cities we visited in Italy, it felt the least foreign, the most easily understood, and the most comfortable. Whether that’s a good thing is left to the reader to decide.

The irony is that Rome wasn’t on our to-do list until the very end. We’d booked our flights into the country, but were still figuring out how we were going to get back. Barcelona, Geneva, and even Paris were all on the options list, courtesy of Europe’s extensive train system and a rather liberal expectation of how late we could get back to LA on Sunday evening and still be acceptably functional at work Monday morning. But a couple weeks of searching culminated in a chance sale on rather comfortable Rome to Oslo to Los Angeles seats, and we had our final destination locked in.

So because Rome was always booked as “the place to take the flight back home,” our trip headily biased our time towards the other cities we wanted to visit, thus leaving us just two and a half days to spend with the city. Added to this was the simple reality that Rome wasn’t geographically like the other cities we visited. With Milan, Genoa, and Florence, you could walk from one end to the other without too much effort - Rome, on the other hand, is damn near 500 square miles. Putting it in perspective, that’s just barely smaller than the city of Los Angeles, and more than 50% larger than all five for boroughs of New York City combined. It is, to use an old Roman term, “fucking huge.”

Nonetheless, we came into Rome in perhaps the best worst way possible: frantically trying to make our train, and dreading the idea that we’d have to immediately get a bus on the other end and somehow track our progress well enough to get off within walking distance of our apartment. Thanks to Google Maps and T-Mobile’s rather generous outlook on providing international data, our “run, train, bus” triathlon worked out almost perfectly, and by 2pm we had our bags in the apartment and were ready to explore the city.

As per tradition, the first day we got well and truly lost. And by design or accident, within just a few hours we’d wandered past ancient ruins and modern squares, the Pantheon and Trevi Fountain, Spanish steps and whoops-there’s-a-cathedrals. We weren’t really trying to hit all the spots, but everything seemed to lay itself out in front of us, and our feet continued to carry us towards monuments and cultural touchstones in short order. Maybe it was just luck or maybe it was habit at that point - who knows. But within four hours of offloading our bags, we’d hit a half dozen of the biggest to-dos in one of the great ancient cities of the Western world.

Three of my favorites worth highlighting a bit:

If you’re wondering whether it’s worth waiting the fifteen to thirty minutes to enter The Pantheon, seeing the dome and ceiling alone are worth the time. I spent a half hour just marveling at the construction and laughed a bit when I found out that no one actually knows when it was built, or what sections of the structure came when. It seemed more than a little appropriate that, in a city where we often ran across ancient ruins across from markets and archeological digs in the middle of otherwise totally modern neighborhoods, one of the largest historical and tourist spots in the city is in many ways a mystery.

Like moose, Trevi Fountain is so much larger than you think. However large you think it might be, triple it. Every photo or video I have is careful to have at least one person next to the fountain for scale just to show people “Look! Down there! That small dot? That’s a fully grown adult human!” It really was comically large, and the spray coming off of the water helped cool the hot September afternoon down a bit.

Late in the afternoon, we went off to climb the Spanish Steps, and once we’d reached the top, we watched the sun begin to set over the still ten-degrees-too-warm city. As the fifty-third man offered me the “opportunity” to purchase an overpriced rose “for the lady,” we watched tourist and local alike all take a moment to sit down on the steps, wipe their brow, take a breath, look over the teeming life within the piazza, and feel the air start to cool as the night approached. It as if the whole piazza exhaled at once. It was such a simple, beautiful moment.

After having had such luck nailing all the spots we’d had on our to-see list back-to-back-to-back, we ran across a restaurant that Beth had on her “must go if possible” lists. Luckily, having run across it at just after seven, we were slightly before Roman-acceptable dining hour, so we were able to get a table outside on the patio fairly easily. And in return, we had one of the most distinctive meals of our trip.

For a restaurant that seemed to take “Roman Style” as as indication to go well past what you’d expect from Italian food, every single dish was interesting and wonderful. Even the dishes that included foods I don’t generally enjoy (raw tomatoes, for example) were bursting with flavor and complexity. Simple dishes like a grilled artichoke heart were somehow transcendent of their straightforwardness, while a Secondi that we ordered almost entirely because Google Translate told us it literally translated to “Rolled Meat Tubes, Roman Style” and we assumed that had to be a translation error, turned out to be exactly that: veal wrapped around vegetables, simmered in a tomato sauce, where every single flavor was both distinctive and balanced.

As a side note, this was only one of two dinners during our entire trip that didn’t include ordering the house wine - both of which happened in Rome. This first night it happened because the restaurant didn’t have a house wine, only a hundred-plus page book of wine options (thank you Tuscan Wine School for helping us pick a truly excellent twenty euro bottle.) The following night it happened again - this time because when we ordered the house wine, the owner straight up told us, in a very charming Italian accent, “Is no that good tonight. Is eh.” I asked to try it anyway, and when he asked what I thought, I answered in the only way that felt appropriate: an agreeable “Eh” followed by ordering a bottle that was met with nodded approval.

Anyway, that first night, as we discussed the day’s events, we realized that yes, Rome was crowded and busy - and yes, whenever we found ourselves around some of the more well known elements of its storied past there were lots of tourists. But get a hundred feet away and it didn’t actually feel particularly touristy. For the most part the city felt like the locals were going about their business, and the tourists clustered in certain areas.

In short, it felt more than a little like … Los Angeles. Which is weird.

To add to the comparisons, similarly to LA, it wasn’t a city that felt overtly inviting beyond the known tourism spots. To get any sense of what it was like, you had to really search beyond the bit that ended up up on the pamphlets. Again like LA, Rome felt like it had better things to do than to cater to the expectations of tourists.

The next day began the first of two scheduled days of our trip. Because of our limited time in the city, we had a couple things we put on the “must-do” list: one day was dedicated to perusing the Colosseum and nearby Forum, and another day was dedicated to The Vatican and hoping I could high-five the Pope (spoiler alert: it didn’t happen.)

There isn’t anything to say about the Colosseum that hasn’t been said before. It’s easy to stand there for hours, feeling the mass of history almost as if by a localized increase of gravity. I found myself fascinated with the textures - variances that denoted hundred of years of technological and cultural advancements, mere meters apart. Most of my photos, in fact, are just close ups or wide panoramas that highlight the textures of the Colosseum. That said, it was one of the few times I wish we’d have taken a tour - there’s only so much to absorb by walking around on your own and staring at things. The few times I overheard tour groups, the information they were getting seemed like fascinating additions to the experience.

The Vatican was the exact opposite: we had the unique experience of a guided tour of the gardens, coupled with a remarkably colorful history lesson that leaned heavily into the fighting spirit of the Vatican’s storied and tempestuous relationship with Italy. Turns out that even the heads of multi-billion-person religions are sometimes the scrappy underdogs in the retelling of their own tales. The words “faithful” and “exiled” and “oppressive” were used rather liberally as we strolled through the perfectly manicured gardens discussing thousands of years of Catholic history under the Roman sun.

Out of the gardens, we had the rest of the Vatican to wade though - something that I would have absolutely relished had it not been for the apparent flood of other people aiming to do the same.

The one thing I wanted to see above all else was the Sistine Chapel - an hour-long wait that resulted in equal amounts of disappointment for the actual chapel itself and the disrespect of the visiting hordes. Granted, being packed into a small area with hundreds of people who felt too special to follow the repeated “no flash photography please - it damages the chapel” and “please no talking - this is a place of worship” announcements was certainly no way to fully appreciate the artistic elements of the chapel. But if I’m being completely honest, I don’t think I would have had much different of a reaction had I stood alone in the center of the silent building, free to contemplate and examine the chapel in solitary peace. I know the history and its importance. I’ve seen the photos. It…just didn’t do anything for me.

Now Saint Peter’s Basilica stands on the other end of the awe scale. In fact, it ruins the scale entirely, forcing you to hastily make a new scale just to properly convey the applicable amount of awe. Standing in that building feels impossible. The space between the floor and ceiling isn’t communicated properly with words - hell, it’s barely conveyed with photos.

If the intention of Saint Peter’s Basilica was to be the physical manifestation of one religion’s idea of man’s distance from God, then they pretty much nailed it. Because that’s what it felt like to stand in the center and look around.

The detail of the marble carvings was unreal. Or too real - rock conveying sheer silk sliding over bone and muscle and veins. The pillars extended upwards as if into the clouds. The angels above, carved out of solid marble, seemed at the same time far too massive to be supported by the ceiling, and too dainty to need to be attached at all. If they circled the room once per hour on their own power, I wouldn’t have been shocked in the least.

Even after two weeks of increasingly impressive cathedrals - nothing stood even remotely close to Saint Peter’s Basilica. Nothing. I think we spent an hour just walking around - seeing, touching, marveling. I could have spent a lifetime there and not been able to convey the majesty of the space. I’m not a religious person, but it is without question simply breathtaking.

Back within the (Roman) city limits, the downside of devoting so much time to those two locations was that it left us just the evenings and our initial half-day to get acquainted with the rest of the massive city. The bad news is that I don’t think we really got to experience the culture of modern Rome as much as we’d have liked to in retrospect. The good news is that despite the timeframe, the evenings in Rome were nonetheless memorable.

Without going into detail on everything we ate and drank, it ranged from merely excellent to superb. Rome had treasures that ranged from a place near our apartment where the owner himself served us (and forgot to put in my entree order, resulting in a comically exaggerated forehead-slapping apology and a few items on the house), to the best gelato we had in all of Italy, to a nondescript restaurant in what can only be described as “cobblestone Brooklyn” where the room next to us regularly exploded with old Italians half-drunkenly singing old Italian standbys and the main dining room was filled with young locals there for the equivalent of your favorite Aunt’s home cooking.

We enjoyed three hour dinners where we chatted with the couple next to us (an older Mexican couple - he was a general in the Mexican military, and she was a diplomat), and the younger British girls who replaced them after they left. We watched a hundred mopeds and motorcycles all gather together to drink wine on the steps of a church, bought a bottle for a table of strangers we were chatting with, and nearly caused an international incident when we showed up at a restaurant with a bottle we’d brought from Florence.

That final night we walked slowly back to our apartment, hearing the local church clocktowers signaling midnight while knowing that we had to be up early the next morning to catch our flight - but nonetheless taking as much time as we could steal alongside the Tiber as it rippled and slipped south towards the Mediterranean.

Ultimately, I don’t think anything in Rome itself really surprised me - but I also expect that’s on us. My memory is of a major city, Italian style. There was certainly history, but it felt segmented away, and we never got to experience the rest of the city that was culturally distinctive from what we’d seen before. Again, it felt more like Los Angeles than Milan or Florence. But maybe that’s what Rome ultimately was (for us, at least) - an opportunity to end our experience in a liminal space that blended Italy with familiarity as a transition back to home.

As the taxi picked us up the next morning and took us to Rome’s airport, I took my final photos in Italy: the sun illuminating and shining through the long, languid clouds that hung high in the sky. After two weeks away, having seen six areas and cities throughout Northern Italy, and finally seeing the city where my family came from, there were just two flights left to bring us back to our daily lives.

It was, as it always is, too soon. But in a trip filled with surprises, we still had one left: it turns out that if you catch the right flight - say a 6:45pm heading west out of Oslo - the sunset shines purple through the windows nearly the whole flight home.

#Italy #Travel #Four months late I know #long reads #longreads #vacation

3 notes · View notes

getanattitude · 4 years

Text

What Sports Can Teach Us About fire inside music

“The greater you dig into a bit of Ives, the more pleasure you get from it,” the pianist Jeremy Denk explained a short while ago, sitting down in a piano in the rehearsal Place for the Juilliard University. “It’s like resolving a puzzle.”

Then he enthusiastically deconstructed Ives’s “Concord” Sonata, untangling and detailing the themes and motifs embedded within the intricate textures of the interesting score.

Mr. Denk is about to launch a disc, “Jeremy Denk Performs Ives” (Assume Denk Media), that includes two piano sonatas, an esoteric choice of repertory for just a debut solo album. But then, there's nothing generic concerning this adventurous musician. His vivacious intellect is manifest the two in his actively playing and on his weblog, Think Denk, an outlet for astute musical observations and witty musings, no matter if a lament about inedible meatballs or maybe a spoof job interview with Sarah Palin.

Mr. Denk will reveal his far more mainstream credentials when he performs Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with Charles Dutoit as well as Philadelphia Orchestra commencing on Thursday in the Kimmel Heart in Philadelphia and on Oct. twelve at Carnegie Hall.

Mr. Denk argues that the Ives sonatas, composed early from the 20th century, are mistakenly categorized as avant-garde performs in lieu of “epic Passionate sonatas with Lisztian thematic transformations.” Towards the informal listener, the audio that Mr. Denk describes during the CD booklet as “amazing, creative, tender, edgy, wild, original, witty, haunting” can absolutely seem avant-garde. Ives, who manufactured his living in the coverage enterprise, integrated jazz, riffs on Beethoven and American hymns, marches and folks songs into his daringly experimental piano sonatas, full of polytonality, thematic layering and rhythmic complexity.

“It’s so splendidly in-your-facial area,” Mr. Denk stated, demonstrating a very maniacal passage within the “Concord” Sonata. “It’s also rather surprisingly ugly. There is something maddening about his sense of humor. Ives is consistently thumbing his nose at you in a way.”

But Mr. Denk implies that Ives’s tenderness, which he illuminates beautifully With this recording, is underappreciated. “Ives is commonly about items recalled,” he reported, “or Recollections or visions fetched out of some complicated spot.”

He performed the harmonically misty passages in the second movement of the “Concord,” exactly where Ives directs that a bit of Wooden be pressed around the upper keys to provide a cluster chord. “It doesn’t come to feel gimmicky in any way to me,” Mr. Denk explained. “It’s all blues in The underside. Ives understood how to use Those people very little clichéd bits of Americana in a method that quickly will get your gut. You are able to’t imagine how touching it's.”

Mr. Denk, 40, has actually been passionate about Ives since his undergraduate times at Oberlin in Ohio, the place he carried a double important in piano functionality and chemistry. “My entire double diploma experience was fairly of a constant freakout of 1 type of A further,” he reported.

He were a “genuinely nerdy high school college student” which has a restricted social lifestyle, he reported. “At any time given that I was a kid I planned to go to Oberlin and required the liberal arts. Definitely I actually get intense enjoyment out of drawing connections involving items and poems and literature and concepts.”

Mr. Denk described himself being a “exercise maniac,” but his horizons have extended significantly outside of the apply room given that Oberlin. Although nibbling an infinite bit of chocolate product pie at an Upper West Facet diner close to the condominium he has rented considering the fact that all over 1999, Mr. Denk referred to his web site, contacting it “an incredibly good outlet to release tensions of 1 variety or Yet another.” He explained it experienced drawn new listeners to his concert events. An avid reader of liberal political weblogs, Mr. Denk dreams of crafting a classical music version of Wonkette, he said, but that would be not easy to do with no offending individuals. And he tries to steer clear of offending persons, he extra, even though he did not too long ago article a rant about software notes.

youtube

Mr. Denk, who calls himself “an actual Francophile,” is tender-spoken but extreme, his conversation peppered with references to numerous “obsessions”: espresso, Ives, Bach, Proust, Baudelaire and Emerson.

He went off on “a Balzac mania” a several years in the past, he explained.

youtube

“That was a perilous time, and every thing in everyday life appeared drawn away from a Balzac novel,” he extra. “I lost about a few decades of my life to Proust. I’m absolutely sure it transformed all the things, such as my enjoying.

“In the future my manager was like, ‘Dude, It's important to target your job and receiving your things alongside one another.’ ” At that point, Mr. Denk said, “I had been bringing Proust to conferences.” He added: “I’m not sure I really had a job route. I used to be just carrying out my Bizarre detail, which possibly gave the look of a disastrous nonroute to a lot of the folks who had been seeing around me. I don't forget some exasperated meetings with my administration, Nonetheless they were quite affected individual and devoted, which I’m insanely grateful for.”

Mr. Denk grew up in Las Cruces, N.M., amongst two brothers, a son of tunes-loving nonmusician mom and dad. His father, who may have a doctorate in chemistry, has long been (at distinct occasions) a Roman Catholic monk plus a director of Laptop or computer science at New Mexico State University.

Mr. Denk stays hooked on the chili peppers of Las Cruces, he explained, seemingly only 50 % joking: “The pink along with the eco-friendly and The entire spirituality of chili peppers. It’s nonetheless a big Component of my lifetime. Once i go dwelling I drop by this genuine dive and obsess over their green meat burrito.”

When not on tour, Mr. Denk spends time along with his boyfriend, Patrick Posey, a saxophonist along with the director of orchestral routines and preparing at Juilliard, wherever Mr. Denk acquired his doctorate, researching with Herbert Stessin. Mr. Stessin recollects possessing been amazed by “the maturity and depth” of Mr. Denk’s playing and remembers him as “a unprecedented student who absorbed factors extremely rapidly.”

Mr. Denk stated he “was at school eternally” right until “at some time I chose to believe in my very own instincts.” Now he teaches double-diploma undergraduates in the Bard College Conservatory of Audio. The pianist Allegra Chapman, who studied with him, said he was “concerned with a great deal over the notes over the site, generally bringing up literary and historical references.”

“Now I try to approach songs within a additional holistic standpoint,” she included. “He may be very passionate. He accustomed to jump across the place and bounce about and wave his arms. It absolutely was actually exciting. He tried to get me to consider the new music having a sense of humor.”

youtube

This blend of passion, humor and intellect, so vivid in each Mr. Denk’s enjoying and his producing, is what distinguishes him, in accordance with the violinist Joshua Bell. The two have been frequent duo companions considering the fact that 2004, once they executed on the Spoleto Competition United states.

“You can get the intellectual musicians or people that use their coronary heart on their own sleeve with no great deal of musical believed,” Mr. Bell claimed, “but Jeremy manages to perform each, and that’s great. We've got loads of arguments in rehearsal, which happens to be the enjoyment component in addition. The very fact we don’t normally see eye to eye retains things refreshing and helps make me question anything I do.”

Mr. Bell, whose possibilities of repertory are usually far more standard than Individuals of his more adventurous colleague, said he wasn’t normally an Ives supporter: “Using a whole lot of modern music I’m a little wary. In spite of Ives, till I heard Jeremy. He just provides it alive. He has this kind of a great imagination, and absolutely nothing is finished randomly.”

Ives’s piano sonatas, Mr. Denk said, “are in a method like animals that don’t wish to be tamed.”

“Each individual effectiveness really should be so different,” he added, just one cause he was originally hesitant to history them. Like Bach, he stated, Ives leaves a whole lot into the performer’s creativeness.

A wonderful interpretation in the “Goldberg” Variations at Symphony Room in 2008 exposed Mr. Denk’s profound affinity with Bach. Mr. Denk will carry out the do the job and Textbooks 1 and a couple of of Ligeti’s Études at Zankel Corridor on Feb. 16.

To maintain the “Goldberg” Variants clean, Mr. Denk is incorporating new fingerings, he claimed, “to reactivate the connection involving my brain and my fingers After i’m taking part in it.”

“I think it’s a real magical put when you have the muscle memory,” he additional, “even so the Mind is forward in the fingers.”

Switching the fingerings is one way to steer clear of regime, he explained. “I get authentic satisfaction away from crafting in a extremely great fingering. It truly is like relearning the piece, and it would make you not choose any Take note without any consideration.”

The musical philosophy Mr. Denk relates to Bach, Ives and various repertory is maybe most effective summed up in that site publish on plan notes: “I’ve hardly ever been an enormous fan from the ‘Imagine how innovative this piece was when it absolutely was composed’ faculty of inspiration. For my revenue, it ought to be innovative now. (And it is.) No matter what else the composer might have intended, he or she didn’t want you to think, ‘Boy, that must are actually cool back again then.’ The most simple compositional intent, the absolute ur-intent, is you play it now, you ensure it is transpire now.”

0 notes

how2to18 · 5 years

Link

LARB PRESENTS William T. Vollmann’s introduction to Ivo Andrić’s Omer Pasha Latas: Marshal to the Sultan, translated by Celia Hawkesworth and published by NYRB Classics today.

“If we all had the opportunity, courage and strength to transform just a part of our imaginings […] into reality […] it would be immediately clear to the whole world and to ourselves who we are […] and what we are capable of becoming. […] Fortunately, for most of us, that oppor-tunity never arises. […] But if, by some misfortune, it does happen to someone, that someone finds that we are all merciless judges.” This passage from Omer Pasha Latas is a pretty clear summation of the eponymous protagonist, who lives hated and isolated in the prison of his self-made greatness. It also bears, quite sadly, on various pre-and post-Yugoslav nationalisms.

“I once asked him, ‘What do you feel like, a Croat or a Serb?’ ‘You know,’ he replied, ‘I couldn’t tell you myself. I’ve always felt Yugoslav.’”

The questioner was Milovan Djilas, who had fought the Nazis alongside Tito and afterward became a vice president of Yugoslavia. The answerer he described as “lanky and bony […] the career diplomat […] fettered by convention and tact” — thus a certain Dr. Ivo Andrić. In this context, tact may be defined in terms of what we refrain from saying. As it happens, Omer Pasha Latas is a work of brilliant evasion, in which most identities become bafflingly problematic. Who is Omer Pasha? “I couldn’t tell you myself. I’ve always felt Yugoslav.”

“Right from the war’s end,” relates Djilas, “the government was well organized and firmly in the hands of the Communists. […] Yet though the nation’s younger generation was fired with enthusiasm, its working class loyal, and its party strong and self-confident, Yugoslavia remained a divided, grief-stricken land, materially and spiritually ravaged.” In Djilas’s day, these divisions were most conspicuously ideological — although even then questions of nationalism could break through. After Tito’s death, their ethnic character predominated. In 1994, a Serb explained to me how to express them practically: “It’s easy. In my town all you’d have to do would be to go to where some Serb lived and throw in a hand grenade, then shoot some Croats. A small group of professionally trained people could do it. Then you spread the news and arm the survivors.”

“What do you feel like, a Croat or a Serb?” Once upon a time, when there was a Yugoslavia, its language used to be called Serbo-Croatian. Let me simplify: the Serbs were mostly Orthodox, their script Cyrillic, and they felt what has been called “the mystical Russian bond”; the Croats were predominantly Catholic, used the Roman alphabet, and sometimes turned toward Germany. Both of them claimed Ivo Andrić. In the interests of federalism their differences were repressed, both psychologically and politically. (I remember a Dalmatian Croat from 1981 who in a low voice identified himself as “Christian.” He said that he could and did go to church, but that his career suffered accordingly.) At great cost, the Titoists had reconstructed and maintained some kind of Yugoslav identity. That Serbs, Croats, and most other Yugoslavs shared a common language, or at least were presumed to do so, may be readily verified by the titles of prewar dictionaries. Their successor nations have now elevated dialects into new languages — Serbian, Croatian, Bosniak, Slovenian — which remain more or less mutually intelligible, although during the war I once or twice witnessed the solemn charades of nationalists communicating to their ex-countrymen through interpreters. In Yugoslavia, there used to be highway signs in both alphabets; nowadays one frequently finds one orthography or the other spray-painted out by the zealots of ethnic correctness. For that matter, on the back cover of this publisher’s galley of Omer Pasha Latas, you could read a biographical note in evidence of this bifurcation: “Celia Hawkesworth has translated several books from the Serbo-Croatian. […] She taught Serbian and Croatian at University College London for many years…”

Yugoslavia, then, was a failed attempt to unify separate and sometimes conflicting identities. Its 1918 incarnation was the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. In 1945, it became the Federative People’s Republic of Yugoslavia. In both of those names, other Yugoslavs went unmentioned. But the civil war that destroyed the federation was fought in the name of Serbs, Croats, and a third group, whose anguish would haunt the news for years: Bosnian Muslims.

Among the many infamous metonyms — the fall of Vukovar, the massacre at Srebrenica, the rape camps — of this hideously personal conflict, in which neighbors violated each other’s daughters and cut their throats, the siege of Sarajevo remains prominent. When I think of Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, I, who never got to see it before 1992, remember the double and triple thuds of shellfire, and then rushing down the almost empty streets, acutely conscious of my neck; tall blocks of buildings, so many broken windows; another row of apartments flecked with bullet holes; journalists paying 250 American dollars to fill a gas tank; soldiers laughing and ducking behind their sandbags, kept company by a woman who was grinding coffee by hand. Andrić’s secondary school was here, and most of Omer Pasha Latas is set either here or in other parts of Bosnia. How unquiet was it then? Remember that Sarajevo was the place where World War I began. But the windows were not always broken, and women ground coffee in peacetime as in war. Then as now, one would have felt the overwhelming influence of Bosnian Muslim tradition. And indeed, Omer Pasha Latas is set in the period of Ottoman rule, about which Andrić appears to have felt, to say the least, melancholy.

He did not live to see the civil war. But during World War II, while he novelized in seclusion, other ethnic massacres of comparably sadistic cruelty had stained Bosnia. [1] Did he take a side? “I couldn’t tell you myself. I’ve always felt Yugoslav.”

From 1463 until 1878, Bosnia was a conquered province of the Turkish Empire, during which time, according to the historian Noel Malcolm, “the main basis of hostility was not ethnic or religious but economic: the resentment felt by the members of a mainly (but not exclusively) Christian peasantry towards their Muslim landowners.” In any event, the previous sentence contains two terms that though not ethnic were in the context nonetheless opposed: Christians and Muslims. In the 1990s, I frequently heard Serbs and Croats harp back on what had become the bad old days, referring to Bosnian Muslims as “Turks.” But was that just war propaganda? Even in Andrić’s “A Letter from 1920” we read: “Bosnia is a country of hatred and fear.”

So. “What do you feel like, a Croat or a Serb?” Why did Djilas not ask “a Croat, a Serb, or a Bosnian”? Indeed, Lovett F. Edwards, the translator of Andrić’s most famous book, The Bridge on the Drina, into English, assures us in his foreword to it that the author is “himself a Serb and a Bosnian.” (Incidentally, the title page of my 1977 copy reads: “Translated from the Serbo-Croat.”)

Why was this third sort of Yugoslav so effaced yet so visible in Yugoslavia itself? (In 1992, a Croatian Muslim assured me: “It was only the Serbs trying to dominate us who forced us into one country.”) Why did the ostensibly progressive Djilas call his language Serbian, not Serbo-Croatian? If you ask a group of ex-Yugoslavs about these matters, you will receive a discouraging plenitude of answers. But as you read Omer Pasha Latas, I urge you to keep wondering and guessing, for this novel is a hoard of shining questions.

Ivo Andrić was born on October 10, 1892 — almost exactly a century before the civil war. At this point Bosnia’s overlords were the Austro-Hungarians, whose architecture still colors Sarajevo. His birthplace was Dolac, “now in Yugoslavia” (the latter according to the 1976 edition of my Encyclopaedia Britannica). Or, if you prefer a slightly different dateline, he was “born in Travnik, Bosnia, on 9th October 1892.” That place also figures in his novels. What that region was like during his childhood I, who was never there before 1992, cannot imagine, but an English observer from 1897 has left us the following highly significant remark on Christian-Muslim relations in Bosnia: “It is strange that they should bear so little hatred to their former oppressors, and the explanation lies probably in the fact that they were all of the same race.”

More necessary but insufficient desiderata: He went to school in Sarajevo, and also in Višegrad, the setting of The Bridge on the Drina. From 1919 until 1941, he was a diplomat. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1961 and died on March 13, 1975, in Beograd, which was first the capital of Yugoslavia and then the capital of the Serbian Republic. As one post–civil war Serbian edition of his selected short stories complacently remarks, “his Belgrade funeral was attended by 10,000 people.” Back to the Britannica: “It was his native province, with its wealth of ethnic types, that provided the themes and psychological studies to be found in his works.”

In Malcolm’s history of Bosnia, we read that sometime around 1907 to 1910, the young man “presided over” a student group called “the Croat-Serb or Serb-Croat or Yugoslav Progressive Movement.” In name, at least, this hardly sounds Greater Serbian. But neither does it sound Bosniak. Nor does it have an Austro-Hungarian ring. The translator of The Bridge on the Drina writes: “As other gifted students of his race and time, and as his own students in The Bridge on the Drina, he belonged to the National Revolutionary Youth Organization, and experienced the customary cycle of persecution and arrest.” The Britannica works in this episode equally blandly: “His reputation was established with Ex Ponto (1918), a contemplative, lyrical prose work written during his internment by Austro-Hungarian authorities for nationalistic political activities during World War I.” Meanwhile, continuing to claim him as a native son, that Serbian edition of stories recounts the same event thus: “He was imprisoned for three years during World War I for his involvement in the Young Bosnia Movement which was implicated in the assassination of Archduke Franz-Ferdinand in Sarajevo.” I have been told that the archduke’s killer, Gavrilo Princip, yearned for Greater Serbia. Or did he? Princip has also been called a “Slav nationalist,” which may or may not be the same thing. In Sarajevo, the commemoration simply reads: “Here, in this historic spot, Gavrilo Princip was the initiator of Liberty on the day of St. Vitus, the 28th of June, 1914.”

At any rate, Andrić, along with many others, was arrested almost immediately after the assassination and kept on ice until the general amnesty of 1917. Two years later, as I said, he entered the diplomatic service.

In 1924, he received his doctorate in the Austrian city of Graz. (Per Lovett Edwards, “Of a poor artisan family, he made his way largely through his own ability.”) His thesis evaluated “The Development of the Spiritual Life of Bosnia Under the Influence of Turkish Sovereignty.” What conclusions did it come to? The introduction to that 1977 printing of The Bridge on the Drina contents itself by blandly asserting that “the solid and precise information that underlies” the novel “was thus systemically built up through academic study.” But Malcolm’s history of Bosnia (published in 1994) labels the work “an expression of blind prejudice,” in evidence of which we are given this unfortunate sentence: “The influence of Turkish rule in Bosnia was absolutely negative.”

The reporter Fouad Ajami, who visited Yugoslavia’s bleeding ground in the same year, quoted the same sentence in evidence of Andrić’s “great dread of Islam in the Balkans, his allergy to the four centuries of Ottoman rule in Bosnia.” (By then a commander of Sarajevo irregulars had assured me: “They’re only terrorists now. They were Serbs. Now they’re not Serbs. There are no more legitimate Serbs.”) Meanwhile, Ajami compounded the accusation: “He was anxious to cover up his tracks. […] [He] had been ambassador of (Royal) Yugoslavia to the Third Reich at the time of the signing of the Tripartite Pact; and he was there in Vienna in March 1941, when Yugoslavia capitulated and joined the Axis powers.”

The unfairness of blaming Andrić for being Yugoslavia’s representative to Berlin is obvious. Someone had to try, however vainly, to delay or mitigate the forthcoming oppression, when, as Drina’s translator puts it, “Yugoslavia was desperately playing for time, hoping to postpone the invasion of Hitler and at the same time consolidate her forces to resist it when it inevitably came. I recall waiting tensely in Belgrade for Dr. Andrić to return from Berlin, the one sure sign that an invasion was immediate. He came back only a few hours before the first bombs fell on Belgrade.”

I do grant that “he was anxious to cover up his tracks.” Not only had he treated with Berlin; he’d also stood in for the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, whose memory could not but be obnoxious to the Titoists. In 1951, when a certain government-sponsored historical exhibition was about to open, Andrić learned that among other items would be a photograph of the signing of the Tripartite Pact, in which he could be seen “straight and tall, in full dress, in all his majesty,” right behind the Third Reich’s bullying plenipotentiary Joachim von Ribbentrop, who would meet the noose at Nuremberg for his part in Nazi war crimes. (About the pact we read: “Hitler’s bribe [to Yugoslavia] was the offer of Salonika, and it was taken.”) And so the anxious Andrić of 1951 entreated Djilas, “with a bitter, even savage, twist to his lips,” to be cut out of the picture. Djilas picked up the phone, and the army obligingly excised the entire photo. Had the novelist been a fascist collaborator, the Titoists would surely have stood him against a wall. On the contrary, Djilas remarks that in 1945, “I admired Andrić’s steadfast refusal to deal on any terms with Nedrić’s Quisling regime.”

And so I would discount a footnoted rumor, which “may simply have been propaganda,” that in 1944 “several Serbian writers, including Ivo Andrić […] were ready to join the Chetniks in the mountains.” These latter were anticommunist insurgents, who soon decided that Tito’s bunch were worse than the Nazis, with whom they accordingly made local devil’s deals. The Allies withdrew support, and at the end of the war, the Chetniks’ leader was shot in Belgrade. These would not have been comfortable companions for our tactful, cautious, lanky diplomat.

Why those innuendoes against him? Given the complex antipathies of the Balkans, was it enough to be hated that he was a great writer? Did his comment that “the influence of Turkish rule in Bosnia was absolutely negative” sufficiently damn him? Did his novels bear a discernible anti-Muslim taint? Or was there more to criticize?

Some years after saving Andrić from his embarrassment about the Tripartite Pact, Djilas began openly disagreeing with Tito. Having resigned from the party, with prison and loss of civil rights on the horizon, he asked Andrić for a professional reading of his memoir of Montenegrin childhood, Land Without Justice (which, like his better-known Wartime, I strongly recommend). Andrić replied: “It’s awkward for me […] I’m a party member.” One may well infer a trace of ordinary human resentment in the rejected party’s summation: “As far as I know, he never harmed a soul, though I cannot boast of his having done anyone any good either…”

10.

In its entry on Yugoslavia, the 1976 Britannica concludes: “There are […] only two really major contemporary figures: Ivo Andrić, the Nobel Prize winner in 1961, is a prose master — best known for his Bridge on the Drina (1945) — whose works, as the Nobel committee noted, have been characterized by ‘epic force,’ great compassion, and clarity of style. The other is Miroslav Krleža, a satirist whose [works] […] foreshadow the themes of modern existentialism.”

Djilas again: “Andrić liked living and working in peace. […] His [official] greetings and toasts were far more flattering than Krleža’s, precisely because Andrić was an alien fitting himself into a new situation […] Andrić was simply an opportunist — but not a simple opportunist.”

11.

Yes, he must have been an alien, for his characters are conspicuous in their alienage. Consider, for instance, in Drina, the Christian boy from Višegrad who in 1516 was wrested from his parents for the Turkish “tribute of blood,” and thus “changed his way of life, his faith, his name and his country.” In short, he grew into an alien opportunist — and eventually became one of the sultan’s great viziers. All the while he never escaped a “black pain which cut into his breast with that special well-known childhood pang.” And so he brought into being the eponymous bridge on the Drina to serve his lost home at Višegrad.

To be an alien is to live between — and one longish pre–civil war (1974) history of the Habsburg Empire considers that Andrić “represents a bridge between imperial and royal Habsburg and future Yugoslav Bosnia. Although he portrayed the imperial administration of Bosnia with great sensitivity and knowledge, he […] [was] outwardly directed toward Serbia.” It might be equally appropriate to call him inwardly directed toward the Ottoman culture of his childhood. Let us temporarily set aside his hypothetical political sympathies and consider him as the great literary master that he is.

Faulkner could utter foolish provocations about race war, but only an ideologue would therefore dismiss his magnificent novels and stories about the tragically echoing ambiguities of race relations in the Deep South. Indeed, Andrić’s more slender corpus is as complex and subtle as Faulkner’s. To my mind, his supreme achievement is the understated Bosnian Chronicle, but the more crowd-pleasing Drina likewise veils his reductionist “absolutely negative” judgment of the Ottomans in a brilliant-colored web of nuance. Whatever one might think of the long Turkish occupation of Bosnia, with its gifts and cruelties, nuance positively shines in the novel’s central device: the vicissitudes of that vizier’s bridge and the generations it served. “This hard and long building process was for them [the Višegrad people] a foreign task undertaken at another’s expense. Only when, as the fruit of this effort, the great bridge arose, men began to remember details and to embroider the creation of a real, skillfully built and lasting bridge with fabulous tales which they well knew to weave and remember.” No “absolutely negative” here!

12.

But by now it should be clear that Omer Pasha Latas will be no paean to the Ottoman period. In the very first pages, when our eponymous protagonist comes to Sarajevo in 1850 to implement certain moderately progressive reforms at whatever cost to the local Muslim gentry, “The procession […] was truly impressive and intimidating, but somehow overdone. In front of it and behind it, to the right and left of it, stretched the deprivation of a poor harvest and a hungry spring, the bleakness of crooked, puddle-filled alleys, dilapidated eaves and long unpainted houses, the poorly dressed people and their anxious faces.”

But unlike the vizier of Drina, Omer Pasha, who began his life utterly beyond the Ottoman pale, voluntarily defects to the Turkish Empire. Almost right away “he found good, warmhearted people,” and upon their advice he converts to Islam.

As it happens, there was a real “Omer-paša Latas[,] [b]orn Michael Lattas,” whom Malcolm’s history describes as “one of the most effective and intelligent governors [Bosnia] ever had in this last century of Ottoman rule,” and who implemented certain reforms to the benefit of the Christian minority. In Andrić’s portrayal you will find little testimony of his effectiveness, and even less of his arguable benignity. He is, in a word, lost.

If warmhearted people are less in evidence in Omer Pasha than they might be (Andrić specializes in the envious, the jealous, the lovesick, and above all the disappointed), localism and syncretism remain his affectionate obsessions. One of this novel’s many briefly yet elegantly sketched characters is the eastern Bosnian village headman Knez Bogdan Zimonjić, whose massively silent obstinacy holds its own against Omer Pasha’s seduction and threats. The unpleasant Omer Pasha himself (“I will reduce your entire Bosnia to rubble, so no one will know who is a bey and who an aga”) contains multitudes: for instance, the failed father of his Austrian past, his unhappy wife (another former Christian), and the “traitors’ unit” of kindred converts, with whom he operates in exquisitely delineated uneasy dependence.

“Most were despairing vagrants who had lost one homeland and not found another, damaged by life among strangers, with burned bridges behind them […] condemned to being loyal soldiers because they had nowhere to go” — call them fragmentary fictive representations of a certain post-1945 Dr. Ivo Andrić.

And so let me now quote another war reporter, Aleksa Djilas, writing in the gruesome year 1992: “Though he came from a Croatian family in Bosnia” — I pause to remind you of the claim that “Dr. Ivo Andrić is himself a Serb and a Bosnian” — “Andrić considered himself a Yugoslav — a nationality that encompassed identities of all the different Yugoslav groups. […] [He] believed only a general acceptance of such a Yugoslav identity within a common state could put an end to the ancient conflicts among various Yugoslav groups.” Whether or not the last sentence is a stretch, I believe that Andrić’s literary project is indeed the noble one of encompassing all the identities he knew.

13.

Who and what, then, was an Ottoman, a Muslim, an occupier, a person of the third sort? “Knowing that to be a true Turk meant being naturally hard, haughty, basically cold and unyielding,” the fictive Omer Pasha does his best to live up to this stereotype, but one hallmark of Andrić’s genius is that as we read him we keep wondering about the problematic nature of all identities, let alone assumed ones. Consider this telling observation from the viewpoint of the procurer Ahmet Aga: Omer Pasha “was beginning to lose his sense of proportion, to forget not only what was permissible and natural and what was not, but also what he himself really wanted and could do and what he could not.” That goes for most of the novel’s characters, from the man who loses his sanity after a love-inflaming glimpse of a strange woman, to Omer Pasha’s irresolute and undistinguished brother, whom the great man advises to consider suicide.

And so we should read Andrić with due regard for ambiguity and irony. There are Turks and Turkish masks. When the Croatian-born, European-trained painter Karas, having received a commission to paint Omer Pasha, enters the empire, “the first Turkish junior officer who had examined his passport at the border, though barely able to read, had worn […] a cold, repellent mask. […] And it was the same everywhere.” If you like, take such passages as nail-in-the-coffin proofs of (requoting Ajami) this author’s “great dread of Islam in the Balkans.” But Omer Pasha, the strict cold Turk, is not a Turk. And Karas, a non-Muslim failure wherever he goes, takes comfort in bigoted resentment.

14.

In this strange novel there comes no resolution, if only because the book remained unfinished at the time of Andrić’s death; the bitter epiphanies of minor characters shed but glancing flickers upon the impermeable solitude of Omer Pasha himself, who at the end departs for unknown places with us none the wiser as to his mission’s practical accomplishments. How life will devolve for his raging wife, and whether Karas’s portrait ever turned out well, of these and other matters we are left ignorant.

Omer Pasha Latas consists less of sequential chapters than of vignettes, which in Drina would have transformed themselves into tales out of the folk tradition, and even here sometimes blossom into magical realism, as in the case of a certain Kostake Nenishanu, maître d’hotel of Omer Pasha’s entourage, who unavailingly pursues and finally murders a Christian prostitute: “the story of his crime […] spread in different directions and to a different rhythm, to grow and branch out, present everywhere but invisible as an underground stream,” serving the superficially opposed purposes of wish compensation and didactic morality tale — the more so as they diverge from actuality. Not only does this passage give a tolerable idea of Andrić’s art; it also stands in for alienation’s beautiful escapist dreams. The novel’s characters cannot understand each other or even themselves.

One might say, this is surely the human condition … but then new passages hammer away at the Turks, until it grows more difficult to reject Ajami’s interpretation of Andrić’s politics — difficult, but not impossible.

It is hardly unreasonable to see Bosnia, as Andrić did in Omer Pasha, as “a society where there have long been disorder, violence and abuse.” And at times, certainly in the 1990s and the 1940s, maybe in 1850–1851 when the novel is set, “people could be divided,” as he upliftingly put it, “into three groups, unequal in size, but sharing the same wretchedness: prisoners, those who pursued and guarded them and silent, impotent onlookers.” These observations ring true, but not eternal. And so readers must decide for themselves whether or not Omer Pasha Latas contains bigotry. Perhaps the best compliment they could pay it would be to delve into Bosnian history.

15.

As for “that Serb or Croat (take your pick) monstre sacré Ivo Andrić,” (in the words of Danilo Kiš, another great writer from the region) let me leave you with one last assessment from Djilas: “In Andrić’s cautious and quiet reserve there was something hard and unyielding, even bitter, which any threat to the deeper currents of his life would have encountered. […] In his deepest and most creative self, Andrić tried to live outside finite time.” Good communists could hardly approve of that! And indeed, Djilas went on to insist that “somehow, everyone must pay his debt to his times.” However, he ended the sentence as follows, either to soften the disparagement of Andrić or because he was now considering his own darkening situation: “But the wise man thinks his own thoughts and does things his own way.”

Andrić did pay his debt to his times. He wrote about what formed him. His bitterness was sincere, his descriptions beautiful. Meanwhile, like Omer Pasha, he thought his own thoughts, leaving us with haunting sentences and difficult questions.

William T. Vollmann is the author of three collections of stories, more than ten novels, and many more volumes of nonfiction. His novel Europe Central won the National Book Award in 2005, and he has won the Whiting Foundation Award and the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Award for his fiction. In 2018, he published a two-volume investigation into climate change, Carbon Ideologies.

[1] Readers should be warned that my attempt to express narrative continuity in regard to Bosnia’s multiple tragedies may be controversial or even offensive. Many accounts take the position that the Bosnian genocide of the 1990s was a unique event, like the Holocaust, and that it would not have happened without its Serbian instigators. “The biggest obstacle to all understanding of the conflict [in Bosnia of 1992–1993] is the assumption that what has happened […] is the product […] of forces lying within Bosnia’s own internal history. This is the myth which was carefully propagated by those who caused the conflict.” (Noel Malcolm, Bosnia: A Short History). All I can say is that books written in and about (for instance) the 1940s are sufficiently replete with gruesome slaughters for the greater glory of this creed or that ethnicity as to make me uncomfortable with this reductionist position. If my own conflation (or, if you like, misunderstanding) causes pain to anyone, I am sincerely sorry.

The post The Turk and the Diplomat: An Introduction to Ivo Andrić’s “Omer Pasha Latas” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2OWi6VS via IFTTT

#Blogger

0 notes

soydebarriocom · 6 years

Text

Ahora en SoyDeBarrio.com

Ahora en soydebarrio http://bit.ly/2sZl41s

Rapid Programs Of Dating Studio

Going out with might be complicated at a long time young and old nonetheless whenever you become aged it would turn into even scarier. So you will need to get the solidest and securest strategy for finding take pleasure in again. When you get from an age where by you come to feel you need to have wrapped up down within a permanent rapport nonetheless end up one again, it may very well be lonely. This may be due to your partner declining or maybe a failed relationship. Whatever the reason you’ll want to have the confidence thus far once again.

75% of folks that secure re-married have lived choosing partner just before wedded rather than 60% at first a marriage. Perhaps these numbers show that gals are less trusting from relationship and observe that they often not be constantly permanent and possess the probability for failure. Living with someone before you shell out yourself to them allows you to discover another side that you might not have access to truly imagined seeing before. Frequently, this is certainly beyond the boundary gone and will rip a wedding separately. Swift Systems Of datingstudio review – An A-Z

Protection Tips on Meeting In-Person, and Being Aware

That said, think back to your former experiences where communication failed you. Perhaps you said something you happened on be sorry for later, or something the fact that she asserted you can either don’t play or maybe you downplayed the beauty of. Its possible this turned out an event when most people should’ve said something to her but didn’t. In every one these instances, a final results could possibly be equally regrettable. The Options For Rudimentary Criteria For https://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowTopic-g274707-i96-k740468-Best_places_to_meet_girls-Prague_Bohemia.html

Acheive so much level of competition the moment attempting to show using a female. They are receiving a lot of e-mail addresses from guys daily using to ensure that ones email stands apart. As well as the probability of developing them email you firstly are greatly decreased because they are needing guys already approach them usually. Consequently try to be certain to be able to get an inbox response to make sure you diligently read their profile and become sure to help you strike up a connection subject to their interests or likes; it also fails to hurt if you let them have a sexy balance or two, function not take too much. Girls want answered for which you took the time to find their profile and would like to unquestionably learn about these, furthermore these appear eye-catching and also you plan to hit the sack using them. And generate an answer in the girls it will help to help you pose a good matter to help you them. In the event that they are considering you will or your question, they will reply. If anything it helps you will get an answer and bring up your chance of furthering the conversation and so finer to maybe landing to start a date.

Thinking of Being a Downer on Your Schedules?

Internet dating is an effective method to get together upon brand-new people the other with the benefits are that unlike standard dates you do not need to make sure you bother for getting clothed for that special occasion. It would be in the greatest interest to brew a cutting edge id for any internet dating blog. Also, find a microphone and a internet cam to help you find out and know which team you will likely be interacting with upon your online dating sites spree.

We all have the hope of finding that “perfect someone”. It’s really difficult to get out of your social circle and hit on cutting edge and different people. With challenges of your work and work, it may possibly grown to be quite difficult to hold back various parties and social events. As such, thousands of people now desire to look for their soul mates throughout online dating sites. Maybe you too will find love online…

When one of the many going out with professionals, the reason why do you will want to hope the unexpected? You need to believe the unexpected since your date may just be unknown and you simply might employ a have difficulty aiming to adjust to all the dating scenario you are with and you’ll be wanting to believe like among the dating professionals in order to find the fact that success may possibly want to locate. For example, your date may be past due to your wedding date, when you’re get together him somewhere. Your meeting may assist you to stay waiting at the time you grasp the woman’s house to settle on her up. You be required to function like among the list of seeing professionals thereafter roll while using the your punches and not acquire angry now that your day is late. Of course, within our going out with seeking journeys, many folks ought to respect each others’ a while to know our time is valuable and we shouldn’t take on who period being a given; nevertheless as among the internet dating professionals, we should provide 1 the advantage of that doubt and realize that i am not constantly right and we should allow our date to speak about your lurking behind her / his tardiness, before people begin in order to create our own thoughts and answers to the subject.

Many online dating sites allows you to insert audio introductions, so make use of and tell people concerning you home, this could make it easy for that new partner to be controlled by what we are generally. Meant for the more adventurous people you should also instigate a video recording introduction, now your brand-new online love should be able to look at you straightaway. Visualize how powerful this tool can be. Take note no nudity that also contains have no a good credentials where by your property can be quickly be identified. Pick a public site to complete your video introduction.

A in-laws alternatively, getting Roman Catholics, reckoned that there seemed to be clearly only 1 The almighty – theirs undoubtedly – and it was first just together with his grace and unfortunately your private good action that you accomplished connection to Everlasting Heaven, that’s most of the supreme goal. Though additionally they were quite diplomatic regarding it, that they naturally thought other folks can be excluded. Rapid Programs For https://www.mappingmegan.com/7-best-ways-spend-romantic-honeymoon-dubai/ Around The Usa

• Sincerity can be described as must. When register in a very known matchmaker company first in search results producing the stuffs that you want persons for the opposing gender to discern most people. Be truthful together with your interpretation of yourself particularly approximately your facial appearance. Do not standing the photos with the presenter within your data file because it will really scam some other person how you exactly appear to be. This will likely to be challenging to clarify for the associate in the internet afterwards that you all the photograph basically weren’t yours. Picture is certainty really important simply because several match makers online would certainly oblige one to fulfill your friend face-to-face.

0 notes

thirdpoliceman · 7 years

Text

Chapter 2.2 - No and Thou Shalt Not

Spoiler: The narrator is killed by a booby-trap mine planted by Divney in lieu of the cash box. He then sees Mathers, sittting in a maroon dressing gown, bandaged about the face and neck (from the jellying the narrator delivered) with a tea set and oil lamp on a small table next to him.

After steeling himself, the author gets into a negatory-heavy back and forth with Mathers wherein Mathers explains that he led a sinful life and upon reflection had decided that the best way to avoid sin was to say no to everything, especially every offer or suggestion, whether from others or from within himself, including every question the narrator had been asking. (pp. 27-31)

Saying no to everything could be taken as a comedic reflection of the self-denial incumbent in Christianity, most prevalently in its monastic expression. The author would have been exposed to western monasticism growing up in the thoroughly Catholic Ireland of the 1920s. This would have included his school days at Blackrock College, which was founded by French Spiritans, formerly the Holy Ghost Fathers, though this is a spiritual congregation (with priests and lay brothers) and not a monastic order. Nonetheless, O’Nolan, like nearly all Irish of his time, would have witnessed around him many nuns, brothers, priests, and monks who had undertaken vows of poverty or other forms of “saying no” to the offers of the world around them, for asceticism, while being viewed somewhat skeptically in Western Christianity (Peter King, Western Monasticism, 33 (Cistercian Pubs., 1999)), nonetheless is featured in at least some aspects of all Catholic religious and clerical life. He would also have carried with him his own Catholic catechesis of self-denial as virtue.

Saying no to everything is actually also a pretty good strategy for avoiding sin. This makes sense because the universe of bad or sinful things one can indulge in is much larger than the world of good things one can do that can bring one closer to God. After all, eight of the Ten Commandments, say what not to do.

I am the Lord your God . . . You shall have no other gods before me. This has to be the only commandment that’s gotten easier to keep in modern times. There are just not as many other gods competing for your worshipping these days. Jehovah and Allah? Same God, in theory. Hindu pantheon? Couldn’t say much about it other than lots of arms; not really grabbing me. Buddha? Not a god. Shinto? That’s just folding paper animals. Thor? Marvel fans and Norwegian metal heads. Amun-Ra? Thanks for the founding myths, but no more pharaohs. Greco-Roman pantheon? Mostly planets, as it turns out. In the classical Mediterranean, this one might have been tough, what with the wide variety of sincerely-believed in gods around and the prevalent pantheism and so forth. But now? I got this one. . . . Unless you mean figurative gods, such that money, or booze, or certain videos that could become “gods” before God to me if I were greedy, or gluttonous, or lustful. Then that could get sticky. But those are their own sins (see below) and if this commandment covered those, it would render them superfluous which is against a cardinal rule of statutory construction. So this one is basically aimed at idolatry and mishy-mashy, let’s be Christian, but also Muslim or whatever too-ism. I’m on pretty solid footing here.

You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain. I slip up on this one a lot, but with some practice, following this one is very doable. It’s clear, unequivocal, and sets a pretty low bar, honestly. Thanks a lot, God. (That wasn’t sarcastic. Still, was that vain? I hope not. Otherwise, I’m off to a bad start.)

Remember the Sabbath and keep it Holy. There’s a lot more temptation here than there used to be (there’s always been some gray area, too, for “essential” professions and those with work reports due on Monday). Still, keeping this commandment is not a cakewalk. For starters, everyplace but that weird, locally-owned appliance store and Chick-Fil-A is open until at least 6 on Sunday in an effort to compete with Amazon, so shopping is tempting on Sundays. Dining out is too. For starters, I’d recommend the Avocado Egg Rolls at Kona Grill. No one has ever told me shopping or dining out are no-nos on Sunday, but you are making the employees work to serve you and its not exactly essential, except the Avocado Egg Rolls--you have to try them. Also, in today’s economy it’s a lot more likely you might have to work on Sunday even if you’re not a nurse or a quarterback. Fighting your Sunday work schedule with the religion excuse is pretty tough for most people who aren’t Amish or something as it’s usually greeted with a look that conveys, “What, you think you’re going to Heaven and I’m not, church boy?” or “Well, you’ll have plenty of time to go to church when you’re fired. Long live Ayn Rand and Mammon!” Luckily, I don’t have to work Sundays, so I’m good here.

Honor your father and your mother. Love you guys. Once you’re out of this house and financially independent, this one is a lot easier. Don’t hold a grudge. Respect their shit. I got this one . . . Wait, this gets a little more complicated for Catholics, with all the extending of it to siblings and society and raising your own kids right and what not. Still though, I think I can get this one. Just have to be diligent.

Thou Shalt Not Kill. You’d think this is easy! But, not so fast. This also includes not injuring yourself by abuse of food, alcohol, drugs, and the like. Now, as a married parent of a newborn who spends all day at home, this one is a lot easier than it used to be, but its one you really have to watch out for in this era of low alcohol and drug prices, oversized entrees, and the cocktail renaissance (“I’m not an alcoholic, I’m a tastemaker and a chemist!”).

You shall not commit adultery. Oh boy. I knew we were going to get to this one. Well, you knew it was going to come up eventually, so to speak. This one is tough. No doubt about it. It includes basically everything you’ve ever thought about doing that you don’t talk about in front of your mom that’s not included in Cmdt. 5. Essentially, if it is not sex inside marriage with no impediment to pregnancy, you’ve run afoul of this one. Also, it gets a little touchy on the homosexuality front in today’s political and civil rights climate. But remember, while you have to try, you get infinity second chances through confession . . . if you’re contrite. I know what you might be thinking, “But I’m not sure how contrite I’ll be tomorrow. And there’s so much temptation! Women’s Health today is basically Playboy from thirty years ago! And the tanning, forget about it. And the bras. And the shorts. And the INTERNET!!!! People sixty years ago or more had it much easier. They had to seek out temptation and they still failed all the time on Commandment 6. And you expect me to comply in the age of 4GLTE and incognito browser windows?” To that I say, draw some solace in the Didache, the oldest of Christian instruction manuals, dating to the first century: “For if indeed thou art able to bear the whole yoke of the Lord thou shalt be perfect; but if thou art not able, do what thou canst.” Probably the most helpful advice ever given. I wish it was advertised a little more. So, good luck with this. I’d recommend getting married ASAP. Moving on.

Thou shall not steal. OK, we’re breathing a little easier now after the double-whammy of 5 & 6. Keep in mind though, that this includes a lot of economic stuff, like not paying an unlivable wage, price manipulation to get advantage on the harm of others, corruption, appropriation of the public goods for personal interests, work poorly carried out, tax avoidance, counterfeiting of checks or any means of payment, any forms of copyright infringement and piracy, and extravagance. So just remember, being a slack-ass piece of shit at work is stealing too. And, on the flip side of the coin, so is being a hard-ass, greedy owner/boss.

You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. This commandment covers a lot of ground about just not being a bad person. In addition to outright perjury, this bad boy covers rash judgments and presumptions, disclosure of another’s faults without reason (detraction), calumny, gossip, flattery, bragging, boasting, etc. But if you can avoid talking shit about others, lying, and bragging about yourself, you should be OK here for the most part. There’s also a lot of ways to venially violate this commandment (e.g., white lies), unlike with six. So even if you mess up here, just pray about it. You won’t get caught in a state of mortal sin if the Second Coming happens before confession on Saturday (whether this Saturday or the last one before Holy Week next year, whenever you might go). OK, so don’t talk shit about people. Got it. We’re almost there, and the last two are basically one!

You shall not covet your neighbor's house . . . wife . . . or anything that is your neighbor's. This one is pretty tricky because it covers internal dispositions of covetousness of the flesh. So, basically lust. I feel like this one is there just to really hammer home that you should try to keep your mind pure, not just your body. But obviously, impure sexual thoughts is one of the most difficult of the sins to keep at bay, so it seems a little onerous to have this commandment on top of “Big Six.” Maybe there’s another reason for it, though. Maybe it’s here to serve as a tax evasion charge that the U.S. attorney hits a criminal with when they can’t prove the extortion racket. Or the constitutionally dubious sodomy charge when they can’t quite prove the rape, or the false imprisonment, or Mann Act violation. “What’s that? You say you didn’t actually have sex with her. You were just over at here house, eh? Well, guess what? NINTH COMMANDMENT, buddy! We saw you looking at her at the bar. Listen, you can plea this out to coveting now, but if you want to go to trial we’re going for lust, adultery, the whole smear. You’re lucky we came in when we did.” OK, so there’s been some good and some bad so far, but only one to go.

You shall not covet your neighbor's house . . . wife . . . or anything that is your neighbor's. (Wait, what?) This one takes much the same language of Cmdt. 9 and focuses on the coveting of material goods, not the flesh. So this one covers greed and envy, primarily. This can be hard for some to keep, I’m sure. Keeping up with the Joneses is a national pastime after all. But just don’t be greedy, be happy with what you have, and you should be OK. There, you did it! Even if you didn’t keep all the commandments, you tried. Now go to confession.

So other than remembering the Sabbath and honoring your mother and father, and going to church on Sundays, there’s not much else you have to do. In fact it’s the doing that gets you into trouble: doing drugs, doing “it,” etc. In fact, if you said no to everything but what you had to do to stay alive (like Mathers), kept the Sabbath, honored mom and dad, and went to Church on Sunday, I’d say you’d have a guaranteed ticket to Heaven. You wouldn’t even have to go to confession because you wouldn’t have done or failed to do anything you had to do or not do. So with so many more things to say no too than to say yes to, if you are looking to lead a holy life in a Catholic worldview, as Mathers is in the novel, it is wholly logical for him to conclude that the best way to redeem himself from his sinful life is to say no to everything.

This being a darkly comic novel, however, both Mathers and the author quickly discover a Jesuitical workaround to Mathers’s principle of prohibition. The narrator will just start questions with, “Do you refuse to tell me...?” Then Mathers will say no, and answer the question. Ta da! Mathers slyly admits that he’s okay with this sidestep:

So if you ever hear someone offer a priest a drink by saying, “Father, would you turn down a glass of whiskey?” you now know what’s going on.

#thirdpoliceman #thethirdpoliceman #mathers #no #ten commandments

0 notes

trinitiesblog · 7 years

Text

Kimel’s review of What is the Trinity – Part 2

In part two of his review Fr. Kimel says “Once upon a time … there was a unitarian God,” by which he means: suppose that at first only the Father existed, as biblical unitarian Christians think. He then gives a thumbnail sketch of how a unitarian Christian looks at the whole sweep of Scripture. This is all well and good. But then things get silly:

And for three centuries the Church was faithful to its mission and the revelation of the one God. But then the it abandoned the truth, embraced the heretical doctrine of tri-personal divinity, and began to violently persecute the followers of the one God.

This is not my view, and I don’t think this narrative should commend itself to biblical unitarians.

For one thing, any biblical unitarian is going to think that in certain ways mainstream Christianity began to veer away from the apostolic path even before 381. In those years we have the evolution of the one bishop system, the system then progressively getting in bed with the government of the Roman empire, increasing cults of Mary and the saints, the triumph of logos theory and the integration of various Greek philosophical views into Christian theology, the valorization of virginity and the denigration of sex, bishops taking on the roles of secular judges, simony, creeping anti-semitism, the idea that Christians must escape to some nonphysical life and occasional denunciations of belief in resurrection as wrongly “Jewish,” various speculations about the saving power of baptism and how there can be no forgiveness for post baptism sins, ideas about eternal conscious torment, the idea that bishops of big cities should be more powerful than other bishops, and the idea that there can be no salvation outside of this bishop-run network or organization. So there is a lot going on in these years, and it’s not like the transition from unitarian to trinitarian theology just strikes like lightning, out of the blue on a sunny day. A lot of these things are now rejected by most Christians. Others have long been objected to by many or most Protestants.

What’s worse, on a traditional catholic understanding of heresy it is impossible that the Church should go into heresy! (Perhaps this is part of his point?) Heresy is what is taught by a heretic. A heretic is a baptized catholic who persists in teaching something even after the hierarchy tells him to knock it off. By definition, what the hierarchical church decides to teach cannot be heresy, on this traditional understanding of heresy. But perhaps he means to use the term “heresy” in a modern Protestant sense, where means something like a teaching that contradicts an essential teaching of the faith (or something which is so important that its denial results in damnation).

It is not my view that most trinitarians are guilty of heresy in this sense. As I explain in this talk, I think what is essential to the gospel is very minimal. And as far as I know, Fr. Kimel, the Baptists down the street, the Catholics down the other street, and I all agree on, say, what Peter preaches in Acts 2. If you add to these beliefs other speculations that don’t necessarily fit well with them, that may cause various problems, but nonetheless you still have those saving beliefs. In my view, you thus have saving faith.

Perhaps the reviewer is assuming that just as a traditional trinitarian thinks any unitarian theology is heresy, so a unitarian must think that any Trinity doctrine is heresy. But this is not so. Some of us are more reticent about declaring minority theories to be “heresy.”

Our reviewer ends his lampooning of the unitarian narrative as follows:

The knowledge of the one God was lost to the Church for 1400 years, but in his grace God eventually raised up the erudite scholar and Anglican priest Samuel Clarke. Clarke read the Scriptures with fresh and unbiased eyes and rediscovered the biblical truth of the divine unicity. In 1712 he published the fruits of his scholarship, one of the great works of Christian theology: The Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity. Sadly, this important work has been ignored by trinitarian Christians, such is the Satanic power of tradition and dogma. But a new day is dawning. God is restoring the Church to its original unitarian foundation.

The thing about Trinity theories is that no matter how elaborate they become, people still pick up the Bible and end up thinking along unitarian lines. So no, the revelation that the Father is the one true God never has really been lost. It’s more like an official marginalization. But the texts are what they are, and so unitarian theology keeps popping back over and over again. I assume Fr. Kimel knows that Clarke was very far from being the first in modern times to discover unitarian theology in the NT. A large number of such people in the 16th and 17th centuries made this discovery, perhaps most famously the Socinians, originally the Minor Reformed church in Poland. Our knowledge about unitarians in medieval times is practically non-existent, but most likely there were fewer (consistent) unitarian Christians then, as there were fewer people reading the Bible, as we say, “for themselves.”

As recent trinitarian theologians have often lamented, in everyday life and even in much of their devotional life and worship, the majority of Christians in trinitarian churches are in fact unitarian in their thinking, or nearly so. For a great many people all the metaphysical fireworks pretty much boil down to this: sometimes they think that Jesus just is God himself, and sometimes they think God is someone and Jesus is someone else, that is, that they are two different beings. When pressed on this serial inconsistency, they will then jump around between different speculations, such as that Jesus and his Father are two of the three parts of God, or that they are two of the three aspects or personalities of God. Or, the favorite: it’s a mystery!

Two things are right in Fr. Kimel’s statement above. Clarke’s work is a neglected masterwork that repays careful study, whether you agree with it or not. Also, I think that a new day is dawning. There are quite a few people out there who have discovered that New Testament clarity on these topics is much preferable to tradition-based confusion. The steady drip of whistleblowers is becoming a thin stream.

Why did St Athanasius and the Cappadocians concoct the unprecedented and theologically revolutionary homoousion, and how could they have believed they were faithfully continuing the apostolic tradition, when even their great teacher Origen, according to Dale Tuggy’s reading, appears to have taught otherwise?

Well, let’s get the basic history right. Those gents did not of course “concoct” the newfangled language in question. Rather, that language was adopted for a practical reason, and then strangely some catholic leaders decided to rally around the new language and claim that it was all important. It’s an interesting question why this happened, but it’s a question that presses on everyone, not simply on the unitarian.

As to Origen, he was widely idolized, if I can put it that way, in the fourth century, although not universally. He had big fans on both sides of the Nicene controversy. On the Nicene side, the Cappadocians. On the other side, the famous church historian Eusebius and quite a few others. He was demonstrably a subordinationist unitarian, though, though some persist in spinning him as proto-Nicene, or nearly so.

Fr. Kimel, after noting my basic account of how this controversy was forcibly ended by Theodosius I, asks,

How does one prove the assertion that the Trinitarian faith triumphed across the Empire, century after century, because—and principally because—of state coercion? Tuggy offers no substantiation.

There’s quite a lot of complex history here I did not get into. This extinction of so-called “Arian” Christianity took a long time in some places, and happened by fits and starts. At first, the proverbial feces hit the fan, and Theodosius in 383 invited the “heretics” back to another synod try to work things out in a more peaceful manner. But this didn’t work out. It is not in dispute that considerable force was applied. Bishops were deposed, churches were seized, the non-Nicenes were forced to worship in the open air outside the city of Constantinople, where they had been before the majority. Granted, a longer and more detailed historical account is desirable. But not in a blog post or in a short, popular book.

Kimel asks,

Is it not at least possible, nay probable, that the Nicene faith ultimately triumphed because it provided a superior theological explanation for the eucharistic life of the Church and the soteriological claims of the gospel? …Emperors do not always win.

Quite true. Emperors did not always get their way. Imperial declarations about doctrine or official religious policy were far easier to write than to enforce, and many pronouncements against the traditional pagan religion went unenforced, according to historians. Still, in this case, though it took a while, and longer in some places than in others, the non-Nicene voices were silenced. Moreover, after Augustine, there was in place an ideology that justified coercion in religious matters by the state. The tradition chose persecution over religious tolerance, and this took quite a long time to be undone.

Now if you want to come along after all this and say that surely it was really the power of their arguments that led to the triumph of trinitarian theology, I’m not sure what to say. Had they been so confident in the power of their arguments, they could have been patient, and hoped that “Arian” theologies would just naturally fade away, as I take it the gnostics largely had by that time. But the Nicene side was glad to have imperial power smash their enemies and install them in power, and when they went along with these developments, they closed off the possibility of any demonstration of the amazing powers of their arguments or explanations.

And for the rest of history, trinitarian institutions have as a rule used their power to prevent rival views from being discussed or openly advocated for. This tradition is very alive at present. I know learned and godly unitarian Christians who were excluded from graduate school, or who could not find a publisher for their (excellent, learned) book, because of their minority viewpoint on the Trinity. (And no, I’m not talking about me.) Part of the way the mainstream traditions survive, in my view, is to close ranks and sort of de-legitimize any dissenting questions. It’s a rough way of operating, yes, and it is not the way of those confident in the obvious superiority of their explanations or arguments.

Perhaps we can agree on this, though. Despite all of this bad behavior, if there is some convincing argument from the Bible or Christian experience or reason (etc.) for “the Trinity,” then so be it. Let’s hear it then. Pointing out intolerance and power-plays would not be any kind of refutation of such an argument. Fr. Kimel keeps alluding to such an argument, but I don’t know what he thinks it is, really, other than it’s something to the effect that only “the Trinity” can explain (Orthodox?) church practice (and experience?). That’s going to need some filling out, if it is going to go beyond mere assertion.

Still, pointing out the power-plays is not irrelevant. It does not seem to be the way of Jesus and the apostles. They dealt with false teachings by public refutation, by persuation.

I also find it odd that Tuggy would cite Philoponus and Abelard, neither of whom were condemned for teaching unitarianism but rather tritheism. At this point one might be excused for thinking that for Tuggy just about any stick is good enough to beat catholic Christianity with. I kept waiting to hear about Galileo’s house arrest.

This last comment is completely unfair. I’m not beating anyone with a stick, but am sticking strictly to demonstrable historical facts. What is the Trinity does not have a lot of rough polemical edges, unlike this review. About Philoponus and Abelard what I had said was:

From time to time, in the centuries that followed, some thoughtful trinitarian would venture to clarify what the statements must mean. [The footnote cites John Philoponus and Peter Abelard as examples], but was typically denounced and condemned as a heretic by his fellow trinitarians.

Of course I am not holding them up as unitarian martyrs, because neither one was a unitarian! My point, which was clear enough, was that the trinitarian mainstream is not only intolerant of dissent, but is also intolerant of sympathetic and careful attempts at clarification by trinitarians! Those two, in their respective days, were leading philosophers, who were theorizing about the Trinity in the attempt to show how it is coherent. This continues in the present day, although the consequences are far less dire for the theorists, thanks to modern religious tolerance. Nowadays they usually get nothing worse than mild mockery and being ignored.

Fr. Kimel then, happily, agrees with what I say in the book about pre-Nicene catholics who hold to a two-stage logos theory. I make the point that outside of monarchian catholic circles, the two-stage view seems to have been standard before Origen.

Against this, he objects with the case of Irenaeus.

Yet Tuggy fails to mention that many scholars contest the claim that Irenaeus is accurately described as a two-stage logos theorist. Tuggy notes the dispute on his blog but not in his book. I judge this to be a misleading and tendentious omission.

Well, that’s pretty harsh isn’t it? If there is an exception to the general rule, then so what? In fact, I find Irenaeus to be unclear on this issue. That’s about all I have to say about it for now. He goes on to assert that Irenaeus is not, in contrast to Justin Martyr and others, motivated by the platonic concern to as it were protect God from direct interaction with the material creation, which necessitates an intermediary, in the form of this second divine being, the Logos. I’m not sure that’s right…

Kimel suggests that Irenaeus posits no subordination of Son and Spirit to the Father.

As Anthony Briggman plausibly notes, Irenaeus must likely believed that the Word and Spirit were ontologically equal to the Father, “else a gradation of divine being would exist within the Godhead. Irenaeus’ conception of divinity has no room for such a subordinationist understanding of the Godhead, for it would bring his position uncomfortably close to the celestial chain of being advocated by some of his opponents” (Irenaeus of Lyons and the Theology of the Holy Spirit, p. 122).

Kimel then quotes a long passage from Irenaeus that I don’t think is to the point. The thing is, there are clear passages that show that for Irenaeus the Son is less great than the one God, who is the Father. Saith Irenaeus,

… ye presumptuously maintain that ye are acquainted with the unspeakable mysteries of God; while even the Lord, the very Son of God, allowed that the Father alone knows the very day and hour of judgment, when he plainly declares, “But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, neither the Son, but the Father only.” [Mark 13:32] if, then, the Son was not ashamed to ascribe the knowledge of that day to the Father only, but declared what was true regarding the matter, neither let us be ashamed to reserve for God those greater questions which may occupy which may occur to us. (Against Heresies II.28.6)

For if anyone should inquire the reason why the Father, who has fellowship with the Son in all things, has been declared by the Lord alone to know that hour and the day, he will find at present no more suitable, or becoming, or safe reason than this (since, indeed, the Lord is the only true Master), that we may learn through Him that the Father is above all things. For “the Father,” says he “is greater than I.” [John 14:28] The Father, therefore, has been declared by our Lord to excel with respect to knowledge; for this reason, that we, too, as long as we are connected with the scheme of things in this world, should leave perfect knowledge, and such questions, to God, and should not by any chance, but we seek to investigate the sublime nature of the Father, fall into the danger of starting the question whether there is another God above God. (Against Heresies II.28.8, ANF I p.402)

As with any author, we interpret the obscure by the clear. It is clear here that Irenaeus thinks that the Father knows more than the Son. So this is what present-day theologians would call “ontological subordination.” Notice that there is no two-natures caveat (i.e. the Son is ignorant “in his human nature” but knows all “in his divine nature”).

And notice at the end of the second passage that he assumes the identity of the Father and the one God; he’s a unitarian.

In sum, the reviewer wants to take issue with my historical narrative. He reasonably asks for more of the relevant history, specifically immediately following the initial crackdown in 380-381. He suggests that the case of Irenaeus is a big problem for the story, but it is not. What stands unrefuted is my point that there simply are no known trinitarians in the 2nd and 3rd centuries (to leave aside the first half of the 4th c.) that is to say, no believers in a tripersonal God, where the “Persons” are equally divine and somehow together amount to the one true God.

It is a real historical problem to explain how mainstream Christian theology went from unitarian to trinitarian. I describe some steps in this progression in this little book, but do not give a full account. There are still some (later) steps (c. 360-380) in the process that I need to get clearer about before attempting to tell that whole story.

But I dare say that this fact of historical change is more of a problem for the trinitarian. I can tell a story about how things slowly got more and more off-track, due to human speculations and other systemic problems. The trinitarian, so long as he thinks that the Bible obviously implies the Trinity, is stuck with a terrible problem, which is that as best we can tell, no one made this deduction for about three centuries. Clear implications are more or less immediately grasped by competent readers. In contrast, foreign schemes that are imposed upon a text are all the more likely to occur after a significant delay, and after some sort of intermediate steps.

http://trinities.org/blog/kimels-review-of-what-is-the-trinity-part-2/

#Books #Complaints #Eastern Orthodoxy #Heresy &038; Orthodoxy #History #Unitarianism

0 notes

nsfwviolets · 5 years

Text

hello everyone !! my name is ally & i hail from the est timezone. what you need to know about me ( other than me never understanding how technology works ) is that i love wealthy & all its members with all my heart. i don’t think anything has really changed about vi but everything you need to know about her is under the cut !!

❛ new york’s very own violet lennox was spotted on broadway street in jimmy choo thigh high boots. your resemblance to taylor hill is unreal. according to tmz, you just had your twenty-second birthday bash. while living in new york, you’ve been labeled as being avaricious, but also enticing. i guess being a gemini explains that. three things that would paint a better picture of you would be silk sheets, diamond necklaces, & faux fur coats . ( cisfemale & she/her ) + ( ally, 20, she/her, est )

basics ;;

full name: violet ( soft & sweet ) faith ( unquestioning belief and complete trust in god ) lennox ( northern irish / scottish last name ).

nicknames: vi, v.

age: twenty-two.

birthday: 18 june 1996.

zodiac: gemini.

gender: cisfemale.

pronouns: she / her / hers.

sexual orientation: bisexual ( in the closet ).

nationality: american.

hometown: aspen, colorado.

parents: diane galindo ( brooke shields ) & richard lennox ( rob lowe ).

siblings: older sister.

pet(s): one year old miniature labradoodle named tate.

religion: roman catholic.

height: 5′10.

occupation: victoria’s secret angel / instagram model / socialite.

positive traits: honest, loyal, passionate, responsible, authentic, affectionate, reliable, kindhearted, & courageous.

negative traits: loud, manipulative, stubborn, materialistic, selfish, abrasive, hypocritical, insecure, & dramatic.

habits: interrupting someone mid sentence, excessive hair tucking, shoulder rolling, lip biting, & impatiently tapping her heels or acrylic nails when she is at a loss for words & or annoyed.

labels: the vixen & the babydoll.

aesthetics: silk dresses, red lingerie, lip gloss, lipstick stained coffee mugs, matte nail polish, glitter, diamonds, snow days, satin sheets, impulsive shopping sprees, romantic comedy binge watches, ocean waves, lolita, bright lights, day drinking, champagne for breakfast, iced matcha, lingerie as outerwear, yves saint laurent black opium perfume sprayed on the nape of her neck & her decolletage, lavender oil, freckled skin, acrylic nails, snow blanketing trees, hardwood mahogany floors, hgtv reruns, vintage chanel, pretty in pink, rose gold accents, bubble baths after a long day, half naked pictures, & rose water.

background ;;

life for the couple in colorado was serene. they eventually welcome their first child into the world ( a daughter ) & a few months later, their families moved to help them raise their children. both diane & richard always wanted a big family due to their catholic faith. they both agreed they would stop after 6 kids, however, their minds were quickly changed when she became pregnant with violet.

as a child, violet did every thing her parents had asked of her. their faith played a large role in her upbringing which is why she spent every sunday inside of church.

earlier this year, she became the youngest victoria’s secret angel at the age of 22 !!

she is also the youngest global ambassador for lancôme & ralph lauren !!

although she has become more of an actual model rather an instagram model, she still stays loyal to her social media platforms which is why she has over 100 million followers.

she lives a happy life after being so unhappy for so long but she still seeks her parents approval even though they have no contact with her.

personality ;;

she may be loud and unnecessary at times but she is kind hearted and does mean well. even if she does have a bad way of showing it at times.

miscellaneous ;;

is extremely flirty & alluring.

also has an instagram account for her dog !!

her most used emojis in her phone are the halo, the suggestive face, & the pink glitter heart.

she’s a gemini which means that she is expressive, quick-witted, sociable, and affectionate.

her favorite tv show is gossip girl.

her favorite movie is the notebook.

she lives in a townhouse in chelsea that has been featured in architectural digest twice. her home is filled with hardwood floors, marble, gold accents, & constantly smells like lavender.

the last concert she went to was lana del rey.

the last song she listened to was everybody loves you by charlotte lawrence.

the last show she binge watched was you.

the last movie that made her cry was tangled.

loves wellness shots after dogpound workouts.

gets daily massages by her french masseuse.

all & all, she is a mess but she loves the people in her life !!

here’s her pinterest board if you want to take a look !! i also have a wc page here that will most likely be updated over the weekend. & my discord is @taylorshill#4067

#wealthyhq:intro #emotional abuse tw #eating disoder tw #abortion tw #i definitely missed a lot but-#it's fine aakshlfjew

16 notes · View notes

nsfwviolets · 5 years

Text

hello !! i just wanted to repost my intro since it has been *awhile* butttt i just wanted to reintroduce myself for all the new people !! my name is ally & i hail from the est timezone. i don’t think anything has really changed about vi but everything you need to know about her is under the cut !!

❛ new york’s very own violet lennox was spotted on broadway street in jimmy choo thigh high boots. your resemblance to taylor hill is unreal. according to tmz, you just had your twenty-second birthday bash. while living in new york, you’ve been labeled as being avaricious, but also enticing. i guess being a gemini explains that. three things that would paint a better picture of you would be silk sheets, diamond necklaces, & faux fur coats . ( cisfemale & she/her ) + ( ally, 21, she/her, est )

basics ;;

full name: violet ( soft & sweet ) faith ( unquestioning belief and complete trust in god ) lennox ( northern irish / scottish last name ).

nicknames: vi, v.

age: twenty-two.

birthday: 18 june 1996.

zodiac: gemini.

gender: cisfemale.

pronouns: she / her / hers.

sexual orientation: bisexual ( in the closet ).

nationality: american.

hometown: aspen, colorado.

parents: diane galindo ( brooke shields ) & richard lennox ( rob lowe ).

siblings: older sister.

pet(s): one year old miniature labradoodle named tate.

religion: roman catholic.

height: 5′10.

occupation: victoria’s secret angel / instagram model / socialite.

positive traits: honest, loyal, passionate, responsible, authentic, affectionate, reliable, kindhearted, & courageous.

negative traits: loud, manipulative, stubborn, materialistic, selfish, abrasive, hypocritical, insecure, & dramatic.

habits: interrupting someone mid sentence, excessive hair tucking, shoulder rolling, lip biting, & impatiently tapping her heels or acrylic nails when she is at a loss for words & or annoyed.

labels: the vixen & the babydoll.

background ;;

as a child, violet did every thing her parents had asked of her. their faith played a large role in her upbringing which is why she spent every sunday inside of church.

earlier this year, she became the youngest victoria’s secret angel at the age of 22 !!

she is also the youngest global ambassador for lancôme & ralph lauren !!

although she has become more of an actual model rather an instagram model, she still stays loyal to her social media platforms which is why she has over 100 million followers.

she lives a happy life after being so unhappy for so long but she still seeks her parents approval even though they have no contact with her.

personality ;;

she may be loud and unnecessary at times but she is kind hearted and does mean well. even if she does have a bad way of showing it at times.

miscellaneous ;;

is extremely flirty & alluring.

also has an instagram account for her dog !!

her most used emojis in her phone are the halo, the suggestive face, & the pink glitter heart.

she’s a gemini which means that she is expressive, quick-witted, sociable, and affectionate.

her favorite tv show is gossip girl.

her favorite movie is the notebook.

she lives in a townhouse in chelsea that has been featured in architectural digest twice. her home is filled with hardwood floors, marble, gold accents, & constantly smells like lavender.

the last concert she went to was lana del rey.

the last song she listened to was everybody loves you by charlotte lawrence.

the last show she binge watched was you.

the last movie that made her cry was tangled.

loves wellness shots after dogpound workouts.

gets daily massages by her french masseuse.

all & all, she is a mess but she loves the people in her life !!

here’s her pinterest board if you want to take a look !! i also have a wc page here that will most likely be updated tonight or tomorrow. & my discord is @taylorshill#4067

#wealthyhq:intro #alkhsdjf hi #i promise i'll message everyone who wants to plot! <3

5 notes · View notes

nsfwviolets · 5 years

Text

so tumblr is annoying & decided to delete my intro post !! but since i had the opportunity to rewrite vi’s intro post, i decided to make some minor tweaks here & there. & without further ado, here is violet ( again ) !!

a TAYLOR HILL lookalike was strolling down broadway street in their giuseppe zanotti high heels. violet lennox just had a birthday party for her twenty second birthday. she has been living in new york city for fourteen years. i hear she tends to be melodramatic at parties, but also kind of benevolent.

basics ;;

full name: violet ( soft & sweet ) faith ( unquestioning belief and complete trust in god ) lennox ( northern irish / scottish last name ).

nicknames: vi, v.

age: twenty-two.

birthday: 25 may 1996.

zodiac: gemini.

gender: cisfemale.

pronouns: she / her / hers.

sexual orientation: bisexual ( in the closet ).

nationality: american.

hometown: aspen, colorado.

parents: diane galindo ( brooke shields ) & richard lennox ( rob lowe ).

siblings: older sister ( lily collins ).

pet(s): 6 month old miniature labradoodle named tate.

religion: roman catholic.

height: 5′10.

occupation: instagram model / model / socialite.

positive traits: honest, loyal, passionate, responsible, authentic, affectionate, reliable, kindhearted, & courageous.

negative traits: loud, manipulative, stubborn, materialistic, selfish, abrasive, hypocritical, insecure, & dramatic.

habits: interrupting someone mid sentence, excessive hair tucking, shoulder rolling, lip biting, & impatiently tap her heels or nails when she is at a loss for words or annoyed.

aesthetics: silk dresses, red lingerie, lip gloss, lipstick stained coffee mugs, matte nail polish, glitter, dainty jewelry, diamonds, snow days, satin sheets, impulsive shopping sprees, romantic comedy binge watches, ocean waves, lolita, bright lights, day drinking, champagne for breakfast, iced matcha, lingerie as outerwear, yves saint laurent black opium perfume sprayed on the nape of her neck & her decolletage, lavender oil, freckled skin, acrylic nails, snow blanketing trees, hardwood mahogany floors, hgtv reruns, vintage chanel, pretty in pink, rose gold accents, bubble baths after a long day, half naked pictures, & rose water.

style inspo: taylor hill, kylie jenner, candice swanepoel, josephine skriver, kendall jenner, blair waldorf, & cher horowitz.

muse inspo: brooke davis ( one tree hill ), cher horowitz ( clueless ), blair waldorf ( gossip girl ), gabrielle solis ( desperate housewives ), mini mcguinness ( skins ), holly golightly ( breakfast at tiffany’s ), kelly kapoor ( the office ), rachel green ( friends ), & mona-lisa saperstein ( parks & recreation ).

background ;;

violet faith lennox is diane galindo’s & richard lennox’s youngest child. born three weeks early on 25 may 1996 at aspen valley hospital in aspen, colorado. the very moment they held their daughter ( who they lovingly referred to as a ‘ blessing ‘ ) in their open arms, they knew that their family was finally complete.

he eventually followed his family’s lead & became an ultra religious catholic. he even managed to boost up his grades & get an academic scholarship to harvard law school where he met diane.

diane didn’t come from a strong religious background. in fact, she liked to tell people that she only believed in science & didn’t have faith or trust in a superior figure. but when she met a young richard lennox, her entire world was turned upside down. she let him into her life, converted to catholicism, & the two got married after three years of dating.

flash forward to 1992. the married couple is moving to aspen, colorado for diane’s new job at an upscale hospital. they even received a generous check from richard’s parents to buy a mansion in the mountains !!

as a child, violet did every thing her parents had asked of her. their faith played a large role in her upbringing which is why she spent every sunday inside of church.

violet managed to clean up her act & went from being a social media influencer to an actual model. many people don’t respect her name due to her troubling past with her sex tape & being an instagram model but that doesn’t seem to stop her. she has been featured in the love advent calendar, the victoria’s secret fashion show, & many fashion weeks since then. she is also the youngest global ambassador for lancôme & ralph lauren !! as of recently, she has been doing a lot of work with victoria’s secret & has been featured in many catalogs & even became the newest face for one of their fragrances. although she has become more of an actual model rather an instagram model, she still stays loyal to her social media platforms which is why she has over 100 million followers.

she lives a happy life after being so unhappy for so long but she still seeks her parents approval even though they have no contact with her.

personality ;;

even though violet is a lot to deal with, she is a nice person !! although she does have a flair for the dramatics & denies being dramatic all the time. she also likes to think of herself as a ‘ good girl ‘ even though she is far from one. she loves sex & isn’t afraid to shy away from that but she still tells people that she’s good or an angel because it makes herself feel better about herself.

she may be loud and unnecessary at times but she is kind hearted and does mean well. even if she does have a bad way of showing it at times.

miscellaneous ;;

she also had another abortion with sebastian after a one night stand. she doesn’t like to talk about it but she does wonder what her life would look like if she did have the baby or if she could ever get pregnant again.

is extremely flirty & alluring.

also has an instagram account for her dog !!

her most used emojis in her phone are the martini glass, the suggestive face, & the pink glitter heart.

she’s a gemini which means that she is expressive, quick-witted, sociable, and affectionate.

her favorite tv show is gossip girl.

her favorite movie is the notebook.

she often considers going to college or even going back to gymnastics a lot but she not made up her mind yet. she is happy right now as a model but she does miss aspects of her old life.

as an instagram model, she is like kendall jenner or gigi hadid. in other words, she has a large following & people book her for photo shoots & fashion shows in order to boost their own notoriety because it looks better on their part. her walk is average at best but she does have a beautiful face. people hate instagram models working in the real modeling business as it is so they despise an instagram model with a sex tape !!

she lives in a townhouse in chelsea that has been featured in architectural digest twice. her home is filled with hardwood floors, marble, gold accents, & constantly smells like lavender.

the last concert she went to was lana del rey.

the last song she listened to was everybody loves you by charlotte lawrence.

the last show she binge watched was you.

the last movie that made her cry was tangled.

loves wellness shots after dogpound workouts.

this is her !!

also violet !!

alskdfj violet af

i can’t Believe this is vi

very violet

taylor also looks like her alskdjf

lsdfj vi is kelly

more musings !!

violet on a friday night

alskdfjals

gets daily massages by her french masseuse.

all & all, she is a mess but she loves the people in her life !!

#wealthyhq:intro #but like this if you want to plot! <3 #emotional abuse tw #eating disoder tw #abortion tw #alkdsjf i'm probably missing something

14 notes · View notes