Morning still was young yesterday when I finally finished The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha. The John Rutherford translation I was reading, as recommended by a professor, avoided the paralyzing formality so common in translations; the introduction by Roberto González Echevarría, fittingly, was definitely the best I have ever come across. Though he did spoil the ending, his thematic synopsis helped one unpack the novel as it progressed and, like any good professor, pointed one toward things one would likely only realize after several readings on their own.

Reading Cervantes' classic cheers the soul, though at times I expect I took it too seriously. How I rooted for Don Quixote and Sancha, whether entering into battle under a false premise, accepting a challenge to some phony task, or confronting the legion of discouragers, liars, and jokesters who followed their every move! Identifying with characters, whether a good practice or not, never comes easily for me; in Don Quixote, though, my smiles and sighs largely followed the fortunes of the knight-errant and his squire. Rarely in modern novels does one find such an immutably honest and devoted protagonist- indeed, why have one, when the illustration of such a man has already been done perfectly? Contrariwise, principled men often people the ranks of antagonists, while the calculating types beg our sympathies. Quixote's goodness embraces none of this Machiavellian emphasis on results. Whether jousting foes or friends disguised, his good intentions make him a hero, and win him renown in his own time. He is, though, quite the calm, methodical, logical lecturer, a trait which brings back memories of that childhood sage of arithmetic, Lieutenant Dirk Niblick of the Math Brigade who, like Don Quixote, also holds a fabulous title.

Don Quixote is the answer to one of the age's greatest deficiencies, men of prayer, or to be more specific men of, to sound Kantian, pure good will, unafraid of daunting and painful tasks because of their devotion, whether to a worthy maiden, or to God Almighty: preferably both. But most of all, good will is a necessity if we are to refuse the evil parts of our appetite, and attain anything resembling virtue. Demonstrating this deficiency, I recently read up on Sweden's Pirate Party, now set to win seats in the upcoming European Parliament election. True to its name, its platform includes severely limiting patent rights, thereby legalizing piracy. Though I first learned of the dubious organization over a year ago, in that time it has grown to the third largest party in Sweden by enrollment. Predictably, its base is my own God-forsaken age group, 18-29 year-olds. As my father observed when I told him the amusingly bad news, this is a sign of the times, a successful party based on stealing. (No coincidence that it's happening in Sweden, I'll wager: violation of the other nine commandments is already permitted when not legally encouraged. There is also a Pirate Party in the United States, but so far it hasn't caught on, thank God). Gone are the days when musicians were considered to deserve compensation. Now buying a CD or downloading legally is too much trouble even though songs can be previewed for free. It should not surprise us that a post-Christian society has difficulty with the concept of intellectual rights, or, alternately termed, the rights of authorship.

After a rousing evening of watching reruns of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, the quintessential black 90s sitcom with universal appeal, and a good restful sleep, I awoke dreading to get out of bed, since I knew the decision on California's Proposition 8 was soon due. Irrespective of the general consensus that it would be upheld, my innate pessimism and the predictions of a contrarian professor of mine whom I greatly respect had me prepared for the worst. All my fears have, of course, come to nought: the amendment stands 6-1. Unfortunately, the promoters of the unnatural aren't giving up so easily, and a counter-referendum may already be in the works for next year. Oh well. Given the liberal democratic dialectic, and the indoctrination going on in our public schools (though I can happily report that for the first time in over a decade ALL funding for pro-homosexual programs in schools has been cut at the state level here in the Bay State), this may be a losing fight, as evidenced by the outbreak of the gay "marriage" epidemic throughout my native New England. Unlike Norman Thomas, as quoted by the new nominee to the Supreme Court, I am very much the champion of lost causes. A corrupted society, like a wilting tree, may be impossible to restore to health, but a pure, fresh and renewed political order may well emerge from its ruins in the end, springing up in new growth from the nutrients of the old. And with our mind to Heaven God, naturally, asks us not to succeed but to try.

Moving on from the still-machinating immoralists who really believe marriage has more to mutable emotional "love" than procreation, thereby ignoring the string for the carrot. Emerging from my cave, I also learned of President Obama's appointment of Sonia Sotomayor to succeed David Souter to the Supreme Court of the United States. A sixth Catholic justice? Certainly seems a good proposition on the surface. One department of the federal government will be in papist hands for the foreseeable future. Seriously, I was surprised by her nomination: I had expected Obama to select, more or less, an agnostic ex-NARAL board member without a single ruling pro-life ruling to console conservatives. After all, Obama has four more votes in the Senate than President Bush had when he got Justices Roberts and Alito through in 2005 and 2006. Sotomayor, though anomalously labelled "pro-abort" by some pro-lifers already, seems to have a fairly pro-life record, leading the just-cited article to hypothesize that she's an "abortion centrist." None of the rulings mentioned bear on Roe v. Wade itself, but did anyone really expect another strict constructionist from Barack H. Obama? Unless our President chose her with the express intent of infuriating his disgruntled base still more, I expect she supports that ruling. Nonetheless, he deserves some credit for choosing her. As a FOX News piece puts it,

Sotomayor's opinions also cannot be pigeonholed as exclusively liberal or conservative.

In 2002, she ruled against an abortion rights group that claimed the so-called "Mexico City Policy" -- which prohibited U.S. funding from going to foreign groups performing or supporting abortion services -- was a violation of the First Amendment and other rights.

The government is "free to favor the anti-abortion position over the pro-choice position," she held.

In another 2004 case, Sotomayor's opinion ruled in favor of anti-abortion protesters who claimed a town had improperly trained officers who allegedly used excessive force in arresting them.

My advice to the Republicans left on Capitol Hill: take what you can get. Remember Harriet Miers. The Democrats, motivated at least in part by the desire to thwart Bush, allowed the Miers nomination to implode; though most of the work was done by concerned Republicans, the Democrats made few moves toward protecting her from the criticism from the Right. And soon after she was sunk, Bush nominated the much more conservative Samuel Alito, who went on to be approved. If the Right expends what little capital it has left trying to sink Sotomayor, expect a hard Left nominee to replace her. Of course, she has other rulings I'm not so encouraged by, not to mention her activist philosophy, but again, her record is mixed. If she brings her experiences in to her rulings, and has the common touch Obama has in mind, maybe it won't be all that bad. She experienced the good of Catholic schooling first hand. However much sympathy with socialism her philosophy may imply, she'll only replace arch-liberal David Souter. There is a lot of room for improvement! Even if she does her worst, how bad could that possibly be?

Our Pundit congratulates Miss Sotomayor (alas, she is divorced) on her nomination, and tentatively wishes her well in the Senate approval process.

Great was my consternation when I stopped by a dealer in manga on Monday, to check up on a special order I'd made, and I was informed that Rozen Maiden, volume 4 is out of print. Coming home gloomy on an otherwise wondrously bright day, I checked the Barnes & Noble website, and the volume desired was for sale. Given the size of the chain, they apparently took the precaution of stocking up for just such a disaster.

The nearest Barnes & Noble is in Hadley, a four mile walk each way, so the easiest way to order my beloved Rozen Maiden would have been to tell them to order a copy by email or the telephone by way of paying someone else to use their credit card. That, however, would be too easy! In the spirit of the ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, to order such a fine manga, by the incomparable Peach-Pit, from the comfort of one's home and with no exertion, would almost be an insult to the objective. Don Quixote, it appears from having read about half of the novel of the same name, really was a genius. Straddling the realms of brilliance and insanity, he exemplifies honesty, bravery, respect toward the fair sex (both maidens who deserved it and prostitutes who did not), and piety as the Romans spoke of proper attitude and actions concerning the order of society. Even though he honors persons, places, and things haphazardly, taking peasants for princesses, inns as castles, and a barber's basin as Mambrino's helmet, his efforts are sincere and admirable. If piety was difficult in early 17th Century Spain, how much harder it is today! Everything is easy, everything is casual. For a concrete (and I confess more serious) example, the Chartres pilgrimage is today an exceptional endeavor by traditional Catholics, whose gruelling 72 mile march is as much an act of piety as spending time at the destination, whereas almost all other pilgrimages are taken by bus or plane. I am sure the Muslim hajj to Mecca has changed in much the same way. This unnatural facility makes the importance of the undertaking less apparent.

And so, so it is the same with purchasing those gorgeous and well-written volumes of manga. Feeling even more quixotic than usual because of my read, and (I admit) fond of walking as I am, I went on foot yesterday afternoon, and had them order a copy from their cache, which I can pick up next week. After that, to make the walk thirteen or fourteen miles and six hours total, I headed all the way to Amherst center. Like Don Quixote's penance in the Sierra Morena, carried out to the honor of his beloved Dulcinea del Toboso without her knowledge, this labor of love is a fitting prelude to the reception of my beloved Rozen Maiden, tee hee.

[As my mother noted, I must have stuck out like a sore thumb in the People's Republic of Amherst, which if possible is to the left of Northampton. I happened to be wearing my American flag tie in a town where flying our Nation's flag is controversial, and was the subject of a heated debate shortly before and even after September 11, 2001. To quote the article, one of the opponents was 'Jennie Traschen, a University of Massachusetts physics professor, [who] said, "The flag is a symbol of tyranny and fear and destruction and terrorism."' Amherst has, meanwhile, flown the UN flag since the 1970s. In a related incident, shortly after George W. Bush's reelection in 2004, the town hoisted a Puerto Rican flag to celebrate "Puerto Rican month". A local mistook it as a Texan flag celebrating Bush's victory, and pulled it down. She later apologized, but not I imagine to Bush, at whom her ill will was aimed. Anyone who wants to learn more about this hub of Marxism should visit Only in Amherst, a blog I discovered this evening.]

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Since I have not posted a sonnet in a long while, I provide the below for your enjoyment. Written for the same lady as Sonnet XCVII", I was, and continue to be, inspired by how, so she says, her name means Christmas. Generally we speak in terms of corporate Christmases- she is, so to speak,

Sonnet CXVIII A Corporeal Christmas

These Christmas lights of mine are always on,
Are always shining in a public place.
They are to me, as to the human race,
The brightness of the evenings, Montespan
Enticing us to make it through the day.
Lit with the pale of a computer screen,
Or vibrant with the vapid amber sheen
That's given off by drinks, you'd think that they,
So merry, might be out just once a year.
Aglow with every passer's wavelength, it
Is not regretted when I waste a bit
Of time I should be working, linger near
Their bashful, blushing gleam that all may see,
Our always Christmastide, my Natalie.

I plan to alert her to its existence this afternoon. The poem may be a bit goofy, but since she eagerly approved of sharing my last set of verses for her, I am pretty sure she won't mind.

Last Sunday, I hope for the last time, I received communion in the hand. Over the years I have heard a few testimonials, mostly on EWTN, from Catholics who said they'd felt closer to Our Lord when they did so for the first time. That has also been my experience, but what a horrible intimacy it was, I am can hardly express.

After a good, Christocentric homily, Father said the most important part of Mass, and in no time the Eucharist was given out. As always, I switched lines so as to go to Father, bowed, as it's demanded everyone do in a uniform way, clasped my hands and held out my tongue. But Father refused me, arguing, of all things, that it was flu season, and he didn't want to risk the spread of disease. I protested, but he was resolute. I almost walked away, but that would've infuriated him. Reasoning quickly, I remembered that I'd been to Penance the Sunday before, and figured I could bear communion in the hand just this once. Alas, but when I took the light wafer into my hand, a gloom stole over me. I held the Vulnerable, the Betrayed by man, in the species of a tiny round of flat bread with a cross on it. I hastily consumed Him, His grief for Christians sensible. The Virgin Mary, I imagined, must have felt remotely this sorrow when she assisted in bringing Christ down from the Cross.

Such insignificant objections. Yes, the flu is about, and the graying composition of the parish may be more susceptible to said virus, but reverence for the Body and Blood of Christ is in a whole different logical ballpark. Our Lord always comes first. He lay down His life for His friends, setting the example we, His imitators, must follow. For to hold too fast to our lives is to lose them, and to forget them in our loving loyalty to save them. Indeed, some of those Christians who take seriously what God told us this Bread is in John 6 have literally forfeited their lives for our Friend. Paul Comtois is a recent example, and a sure saint. Assuming we, too, desire to be saints, how can we justify forbidding a reverent practice just because it might prevent illness? The bar is high- the Lord tells us that the gate is narrow- and we can conscience such disregard lest we get sick? This, surely, is one of the "outrages, sacrileges, and indifferences" the angel at Fatima spoke of in the Act of Reparation prayer:

O, Most Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, I adore You profoundly. I offer You the Most Precious Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, present in all the Tabernacles of the world, in reparation for all the outrages, sacrileges and indifference by which He is offended. By the Infinite merits of His Most Sacred Heart and through the intercession of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, I beg of You the conversion of poor sinners.

While more Novus Ordo-type Catholics may object by arguing that communion in the hand can be just as reverent as communion on the tongue, I remind them that this is not another debate over whether their preferred practice is legitimate. This is the forbidding of a way of receiving whose holiness is beyond question. Hopefully there will be no conservative/traditionalist debate over the impiety of refusing to give communion on the tongue.

Consequently, I will be at Sacred Heart, Northampton's traditionally French church, for Mass this morning. While my mother worried that the forbidding of communion in the hand may have been imposed by the bishop, making a parish switch futile, I think we would've heard before if that had happened. But believe me, if the pastor at Sacred Heart stoops to the same low level, you will hear about that too!

Back here in Northampton, one of the chief delights is going on walks, as I have said many times before. Although this evening's excursion was uneventful, besides the normal fare of squirrels, raccoons, and whatnot, black bears are not uncommon, and a person usually ends up seeing one or two every year. Though this is not the country by any means, a delightful array of animals can be seen. On a fairly recent occasion, my father saw a coyote, and a few years ago I came across a red fox in a local park. Further, moose are frequently seen by others, and elsewhere in New England, rarely, mountain lions have been sighted.

I have been pondering the variety of regional wildlife for about a week, since speaking with a friend of mine who is going into education. She was up late in the library designing a lesson plan, and I noticed a handout on, typically, the endangered giant panda. Little different from the handouts I came across when I was in grade school, I immediately asked, "Why a lesson on the giant panda?" "Oh, the giant panda is endangered, kids should learn about it." "Yes, but giant pandas do not live around here," I replied. Minus the specimens in zoos, they don't even inhabit the Western Hemisphere. To give a Wikipedia lesson, their habitat is the most minuscule of areas in China. And yet they are one of the icons of cutesy ecological awareness. Just as missionaries have often been lampooned for their zeal to convert the Far East or to bring the Gospel to the heart of Africa, and ignoring their literal neighbors, the greens prefer to educate our children about the plight of animals they'll probably never encounter. Thinking of subsidiarity, I asked, "Have you ever thought of doing a lesson on squirrels?" That would be awesome, but to her it was a novel thought.

Recently, I have lamented the lack of knowledge moderns have of flora and other plant life (in a particularly distressing sign of the times, the Oxford Junior Dictionary recently removed natural, Christian, and historical terms, replacing them with mainly technological terms). Lessons on anything from commoner New England wildlife to critically endangered animals like the mountain lion, would have a much greater utility for the greens themselves, and help to remedy ignorance of nature.

O happy night, I have just finished my last paper final, commencing the off-season. Although there are certainly many perks of residing in the Île-d'-Assumption, and I anticipate not a few negatives as I shall again be a habitant of Northampton, the original heathen city (albeit one with a good system of bike paths; these are actual pictures), there will be yet more of that distinctively modern commodity: free time. Since my summer's ambition is to read Don Quixote, a 1,000-pager, I am hurrying to the ends of my current readings.

Among the Charles Dickens Christmas stories in a collection I received for Christmas, upon my finish of one (and often rather a few pages beforemy finish), I feel the impulse to say, "Now, that is a great short story, paramount even among Dickens' own- one of the greatest of all time! Everyone should have read it in middle school." That is my way of recognizing a good writer. Although "The Haunted House" didn't do it for me, because of the plot structure rather than a deficiency in style to be sure, I was much charmed by the autobiographical details toward the end. The protagonist reminisces his misadventuring in grammar school. Inspired by he, in a class of two boys and eight girls (I would say, Lucky! except that such happy disproportions are also common at this college), he makes a proposition:

This proposition was, that we should have a Seraglio [harem].

The other creature assented warmly. He had no notion of respectability, neither had I. It was the custom of the East, it was the way of the good Caliph Haroun Alraschid... the usage was highly laudable, and most worthy of imitation. "O, yes! Let us," said the other creature with a jump, "have a Seraglio."

A Seraglio! (He got to be Caliph; the other boy settled for Grand Vizier.) In his childhood, he was enchanted by stories and legends of the Near East. A man who cherished his childhood memories, Dickens often has his protagonists recount those legends and books which were their youth. The lists are always studded with Robinson Crusoes and whatnot. "How different from your own childhood, ~," I thought yesterday when I passed a student in a Mighty Morphin Power Rangers tee, and was compelled to complement!

Were I not the recipient of a rearing by said show, not to mention The Pirates of Dark Water (my Sinbad the Sailor!), SWAT Kats, My Brother and Me, the Super Mario Bros TV show, HBO's versions of TinTin and Pinocchio, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtues, Doug, Godzilla, and the ever eco-friendly Captain Planet (though it's a bit disturbing to learn that Whoopi Goldberg was the voice of Gaia), I would definitely say this changing of the guard was an awful thing. But since was, and can happily remember the secret identities of all six original power rangers (Jason, Trini, Zack, Kimberly, Billy, and Tommy, right?), I don't know what to say. How can a boy get through life without his Legends of the Hidden Temple? I am, in all probability, leaving out some fantastic shows which were important to me at the time but which it's now hard to remember, such as Biker Mice from Mars and G-Force:Guardians of Space (who knows- maybe that planted the seeds for my at-last active affection for anime), but you get the idea. Just as those stories Dickens loved were so well known that his whole class could get in on the fun, our common poetry was an assortment of television programs, shaping our imaginations, our art, and even our games until we matured- and then reappearing on our clothing for nostalgia's sake. I can only wonder- what would it be like if I were raised on books in the same way as Dickens? I've always been big on reading, but The King's Wish doesn't have a theme song, and that's that (for that matter, it doesn't even have a Wikipedia page!! What is wrong with this world?!)

Any thoughts on this? As a person who loves to live in the past, personal and otherwise, I am too biased to say much on this, besides that no one can deny that our children's programs are of much higher quality than, say, That 70s Show (for which reason we should all be grateful we don't live in a brave new world {one book I have yet to read} where the young no less guarded than we from the crassest forms of sexuality, minus in Northampton, where we've had a gay pride parade for almost three decades. But even I began "sex education" in the 4th grade, so who knows what the future holds... see why I like the past?), but who knows? Maybe this is all junk compared to what the young novelist learned to read with. I hope not.

Everyone has their share of failures. Last week, the last week of classes, in the midst of preparing for final exams and papers (fortunately my failures aren't academic. About a week ago I had a bad dream where I got a B- on a 4-page paper. A bad dream), I succeeded in convincing a friend to borrow a volume of my beloved Rozen Maiden, in the hopes that I could win her over and have a like-minded manga fan to talk to (I know of other fans, but usually we have nothing else in common!) She returned it two days later, explaining that she couldn't even understand it. Alas, she didn't even like the art. (It baffles me how could anyone could not like the art, which would be blurred if I showed it any smaller. Rozen Maiden is done by a duo called Peach-Pit).
Maybe I just tried a badly disposed person, but then again maybe a different manga would've done the trick.

Over the weekend, I finally got around to watching all 24 episodes of an anime which may just do the trick. Since my friend is super-Catholic (though we still agree on virtually nothing), maybe a series with pious themes and aesthetics will entice her. And this series is (of the still too few animes I've seen) the most Catholic I've come across- in fact, that goes for non-anime TV shows too. Curiously, the historical figure the series is based on is the original poster boy for transsexualism. I'm talking, of course, about Le Chevalier d'Eon.

In the anime, d'Eon de Beaumont, unswervingly loyal to King Louis XV and to France, is remade as a good and heavy-conscienced Catholic. Lia de Beaumont, his sister, is mysteriously murdered at the outset, and d'Eon, searching for answers, soon discovers that since Lia's body was filled with mercury and can't "return to dust," her soul now occupies his body along with his own- as good an excuse as any for his shifts from himself to his virtually identical sister during duels! Don't, in the words of another reviewer, rely upon Le Chevalier's version of history on your AP European History exam, or its theology in catechism class. The series has, for example, Maximillian Robespierre at the head of a revolutionary outfit in the 1740s and trained in occult powers that allow him to control zombies. Yet, there are many touching elements to the tale. Besides the allures of adventure through mid-18th Century Europe, there are many elements which are wonderously uncommon in our dramas and sitcoms. D'Eon and his fiancée Anna go to confession together in preparation for Easter, which is happily celebrated afterwards. In their times of trial, all the characters are quite prayerful, and not a few are seen crossing themselves and praying over the body of a deceased. Another time they even have a three man funeral procession with a crucifix. But more than anything else, Christian influences show up in occult practices, where psalms, and especially Psalm 34 (Greek), are quoted repeatedly in sorts of incantations. Overall, it's sort of like a neutral to pro-Church Da Vinci Code. But strangely, even the villains (even Robespierre!) seem sincere and reverent as they practice their magic; I expect this is because the Japanese author of the novel it's based on has little experience with the Faith). Some may not enjoy this sort of thing, but its right up my alley. D'Eon, with the big crucifix which was once Lia's welded to the hilt of his sword, in fiction, if not in fact, is a model Christian knight.

The series is available on You Tube, but only from episode 7 on. If you want to get a feel for it, the opening and closing are cool- though they can't compare with the Rozen Maiden theme song (full version)! While the Rozen Maiden anime falls flat against the original, there was no such failure in the music department.