Defending the 12th century since the 14th; blogging since the 21st.

Catholicism, Conservatism, the Middle Ages, Opera, and Historical and Literary Objets d'Art blogged by a suburban dad who teaches law and writes stuff.


"Very fun." -- J. Bottum, Editor, FIRST THINGS

"Too modest" -- Elinor Dashwood

"Perhaps the wisest man on the Web" -- Henry Dieterich

"Hat tip: me (but really Cacciaguida)" -- Diana Feygin, Editor, THE YALE FREE PRESS

"You are my sire. You give me confidence to speak. You raise my heart so high that I am no more I." -- Dante

"Fabulous!"-- Warlock D.J. Prod of Didsbury

Who was Cacciaguida? See Dante's PARADISO, Cantos XV, XVI, & XVII.


E-mail me

 
Entertainment Weekly catches up with Alan Rickman at Sundance....

Okay, I think your wranglers are giving me the signal, but I have to say, even before I got to the end of the Harry Potter books —

Before you go any further, I never, ever talk about that character. Number one, because it's not fair on kids who haven't read to the end. And for me to say anything — there's a bit of it that just should be left innocent. It's real storytelling, what she's done, and I'm part of that. So I just never talk about it.

When do you go back to shoot Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince?
They're shooting six, and I start shooting my part of it beginning of February.

It's a bigger part for you this time.
Ahh -- There's important stuff.

Hat-tip: Mugglenet
posted by Cacciaguida at 11:28 PM

 
Catholics Against Rudy: Mission Accomplished!
posted by Cacciaguida at 11:19 PM

 
"Debonair vigilantes at Yale" (Hat-tip: Adam Solomon '10) (That would be 2010. Most of my friends from the classes of 1910, 1810, etc., don't have internet.)
posted by Cacciaguida at 10:39 PM

 
When I said a few days ago that the challenge for Giuliani was to overtake Ron Paul, I was joking. Now, who knows? Schadenfreude, yumm!
posted by Cacciaguida at 12:46 PM

 
Iran Warns Netherlands Not to Air Controversial "Anti-Muslim" Film
posted by Cacciaguida at 5:29 PM

 
"Stimulus package"?! As best I remember, we haven't heard that expression since 1994. It was the oversold and ineffective centerpiece of the first two years of Clinton's fiscal policy. Then someone Democratic bigwig (not Clinton), asked if he was "seeing" some particular Washington chick, answered evasively yet creatively: "Yes, but not as a stimulus package." And that was the end of that phrase -- until now.

Now here it is again, just in time for Hallmark to market a line of Washington-themed Valentines....
posted by Cacciaguida at 10:49 PM

 
Mark Steyn on the NY Times and the wacko vets myth
posted by Cacciaguida at 7:24 PM

 
McCain wins South Carolina; Paul beats Giuliani -- again.

Romney comes in fourth. He has now lost every caucus or primary except in the state where his dad was governor. Hey Mitt, you like data? You got data.

Should McCain get the votes of pro-lifers? There's no one whose advice I would take on that question in preference to that of Notre Dame Law Prof. Gerard V. Bradley (who is also a battle-tested traditional marriage advocate, btw), and Prof. Bradley says definitely yes. In fact, McCain has an impressive line up of pro-life campaign advisers. Plus (as Ramesh points out), anyone who might run his judicial picks past Prof. Bradley has to be considered promising on that issue too.

Duncan Hunter has dropped out of the race. (No, I hadn't known he was still in either.) It will be time for Giuliani to follow suit soon, unless he can catch up to Ron Paul.
posted by Cacciaguida at 10:30 PM

 
It ain't Baroque, and it still needs fixin': The votes are in, and the winner -- that is, the new Superior General of the Jesuits -- is Fr. Adolfo Nicolás. The American Papist aggregates early commentary here. If you were expecting the Jesuits to start setting the world on fire again the way they did in 16th and 17th centuries, looks like, um, probably not. But then, I wasn't.
posted by Cacciaguida at 3:48 PM

 



I love that picture! (Hat-tip: Catholics for Ron Paul)

Meanwhile, the WSJ, in the person of Bret Stephens, becomes the first neocon punditorium to engage seriously with Paul on foreign policy. (My other neocon friends have tended rather toward name-calling, I regret to say.)

In the wake of last week's Iranian naval incident, and given Paul's trade-based rather than force-based internationalism, Stephens asks a fair question: are American trading vessels within the U.S. defense perimeter? And if so, may we presume that the U.S. Navy vessels that protect them will do so, in a Paul Administration, with appropriate rules of engagement?

Other presidents with (some sort of) libertarian leanings, and with little-America predilections, have faced the same dilemma: e.g. Jefferson with the Barbary Pirates: behold, he hesitated not to lob the Holy Hand Grenade toward his foes, who, being naughty in God's sight, snuffed it....
posted by Cacciaguida at 12:28 AM

 
So, d'ya hear today's Harry Potter news? Yup -- Deathly Hallows may be split into two movies!
posted by Cacciaguida at 6:01 PM

 
Well I listened to the Met broadcast of Verdi's MACBETH this afternoon. I haven't seen Adrian Noble's 20th-century-set production. From what I've read about it, I think I could go for it: I'm not utterly bigoted against non-traditional productions, only against the kind that shriek Look Ma I'm Directing.

It makes sense to show the Macbeths as a modern-day ambitious power-couple (doesn't it, though), and to show the Scottish refugees in a place that looks like -- gosh, a refugee camp, complete with jeep and bored guard (not border guard, though, yeah, probably one of those too).

N.B. It was Verdi who added the refugees. He was very interested in choruses of exiles, like the famous one in NABUCCO ("Va pensiero"). In MACBETH, this scene takes the place of the long dialogue in which Malcolm fakes out Macduff to test his moral fiber, a scene that wouldn't operatize well.

Apart from that, Shakespeare's play translates to opera very well. Lady Macbeth's entrance scene, as written by Shakespeare, even has the classic structure of the entrance scene of a heroine in bel canto opera: a recitative ("'They met me on the day'/Glamis thou art, and Cawdor"), an aria ("Hie thee hither"), an interruption by messenger or attendant (the former, in this case), and a cabaletta ("The raven himself is hoarse"). And so we get "'Nel di della vittoria'/Ambizioso spirito," "Vieni t'affretta, and "Or tutti sorgete." ("Or tutti sorgete" is the show-stopper, but I like "Vieni t'affretta" best.)

And the sleepwalking scene? Made for opera! "Una macchia...." ("A spot....")

Our Macbeth today was Zeljko Lucic. With a name like that, you're either a star at the Met or defendant at the Hague. He's the former, and a Verdi baritone strongly reminiscent of Cornell Macneil, which is high praise.

More controversial was our Lady Macbeth, Maria Guleghina. "Ghouleghina," some have been calling her, and the reference is to the condition of her voice. It's all right for Lady Macbeth to sound scary, but the source of the fright shouldn't be whether or not she'll have the next high note or be on pitch in the next roulade. The answer was always yes for Ms. Guleghina today -- it just didn't sound very good. I'm sure she got her effects dramatically, but I couldn't help noticing that the Saturday matinee audience -- notoriously easy to please -- didn't exactly give it up for Ms. G., either after her arias or at curtain calls.

(Andrea Gruber is doing some performances of Lady Macbeth this season. Last season she sang the broadcast of TURANDOT: I thought she was fine, but most of The List thought she was goshawful, so go know. If anybody has heard her Lady M. this year, please comment.)

In the smaller roles, bass John Relyea boomed it out a treat as Banquo, and New York-native tenor Dimitri Pittas showed promise in the lirico department as Macduff. In the thankless role of Malcolm (a second tenor, overshowed by primo tenore Macduff, itself not a great role), Russell Thomas showed dramatic-tenor potential: nice and clarion -- he almost had me cutting down a branch for the march on Scotland.

James Levine clearly loves this score, and lingered over its riches so as to make it sound like "later" Verdi than it actually is.
posted by Cacciaguida at 8:50 PM

 
Life imitates DIE WALKÜRE: The Times reports.
posted by Cacciaguida at 12:36 AM

 
General: Anbar Ready for Handover
posted by Cacciaguida at 12:34 AM

 
Just watched most of the South Carolina GOP debate.

Representing, as they do, opposite ends of the Iraq issue, I enjoyed both Ron Paul and John McCain on that issue. I wish Ron would stop using the word "blowback," but the term "unintended consequences" is unthreatening and hard to argue with. I don't agree that Al Qaeda originated with the anti-Soviet mujahadeen of the 1980s, but it would be naive to think none of its "fighters" got their early training and indoctrination there. And as welcome a development as the Anbar Awakening is (Ron disagrees, of course), will the Awakenees someday be aiming WMDs at us in some future war? It's not inevitable, but Paul is not a nut for asking the question.

In all fairness I thought Huckabee did a great job with that smarmy question about his views on Ephesians-style marriage (the moderator making it an "electability" issue -- well, maybe the Huckster had it coming: you know, Evangelical Christianity being treated like Mormonism, since all along he's been treating Romney's Mormonism like Mormonism, which as you know is quite unfair).

Anyway, Huckabee turned his answer into a more-than-passable homily on marriage: "It's not 50/50, it's 100/100." Scott Hahn has often said this about all covenantal relationships.

On immigration, I was left queasily wondering what kind of stasi state it will take to "round up" those 12 million illegals. If it's Romney, no doubt he'll just get "the data" and "assemble a great team" and "get the job done." The midnight knocks, mass roundups, and detention centers will take place far from the media glare. At least Thompson admitted ain't no 12 million gonna get rounded up, though I couldn't rightly tell you what he did say. As for Giuliani, I guess he'll just perp-walk them all into deportation stations, but hey, at least their kids will be in public school. (But why should the kids suffer -- that's my question.)

The best on immigration were -- McCain and Paul. McCain got in a line about how he's not going to deport the illegally present wife of a currently serving member of the U.S. Armed Forces; the larger point being, I take it, that there is not in fact a fungible class of interchangeable human flesh called "illegals."

Paul, admitting self-deprecatingly that he may be too fixated on economics, quoted the adage that "you get more of what you subsidize" and drew the conclusion that "you can't separate the problem of illegal immigration from the problem of welfarism." I'd rather have heard something about the positive economic contributions of immigrants, but time was sharply limited, and many illegal immigrants (as well as others) do cause drawdowns on public benefits, even if not all do and even if some give something back to the economy.

One more issue: Israel. Of course all candidates were competing to outdo each other in pledges of love and fealty. Ron Paul was not really an exception, but he offered Israel something different: respect.

He recalled that he defended Israel's 1981 attack on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor, and that few others did. No one else on that stage went near that issue. Just because they didn't defend Israel on that occasion in 1981, you say? Oh but it would be easy enough to say "I agree that Israel should unilaterally defend herself as she thinks best." They don't say that, and I increasingly suspect it's because they don't think it. The pablum about "ally" and "only democracy in the region" and "longstanding relationship" comes easily to their lips, but none of that rhetoric denies -- indeed it implies -- exactly what Ron charges: that according to them, Israel is still under U.S. tutelage and is expected to run her major foreign policy and defense moves by us for pre-approval. Ron, of course, will have none of that.

Long-time readers know that this blog is a friend of the State of Israel. And I don't see why any friend of Israel should have reservations about Ron Paul based on what he said about Israel tonight. If your reservations are about Iraq, go ahead; I still have some myself. But not about Israel.
posted by Cacciaguida at 11:20 PM

 
The Exam Grader's Carol

The Con Law exams bear I
Bedeck't with Fs and D min-i!
And I pray you, o Deans, be dry of eye,
Quod estis academicos!

On a more positive note, in my Criminal Law class, Miss Grainger (that's how the one I've got spells it) got an A.

In other news: Barfing Bug Bashes Britain. Urp for England!
posted by Cacciaguida at 3:29 PM

 
Birthday commemoration: Nell Rankin, 1926-2005
posted by Cacciaguida at 12:59 PM

 
Before the caucusing starts in Iowa tomorrow, and because I've been critical of McCain in my comment boxes here, I want to note that I admire the come-back he has achieved, which has been almost entirely through coffee-shop-by-coffee-shop retail politics.

As far apart as he and Ron Paul are on some issues, I think there's a quality of non-fakery (I'm tired of the word "earnestness" -- Ernest needs a rest) that I think people respond to in both of them. So I'm glad to see McCain leading in some New Hampshire polls, I hope Paul hits double digits, and I wouldn't mind Schmuckabee winning Iowa just because that would hasten Romney dissolving into a pool of polyurethane as his NH operation implodes.

And on the Democrats' side, I agree with Bill Kristol that Hillary needs a setdown; in fact, America needs for Hillary to get a setdown. So Obama really did want to be president when he was five, and said so in an essay in kindergarten in Indonesia? Wow, man, Hillary really thought she had him nailed on that one! Actually, what the incident tells me is:

* Hillary, in classic Clinton fashion, employs private detectives for state-of-the-art oppo research;
* Obama went to an awfully good school, if they were writing essays on personal ambition in kindergarten, I mean my gosh;
* In Indonesia? My, he may actually have the international resume others would like to brag about.

So I wish the Dems an Obamalamadingdong tomorrow.
posted by Cacciaguida at 10:44 PM

 
Longtime campaign pro Ed Rollins (past clients include Reagan -- and Perot) says: "What I have to do is make sure that my anger with a guy like Romney, whose teeth I want to knock out, doesn't get in the way of my thought process."

Gee, the rest of us just want to tap Romney's hair for fuel.

As for Huckabee, Prof. Kenneth Anderson, in the Standard, gets it right -- cruel, but right:

I myself propose that Huckabee be horse-whipped in the square of public reason and turned out of politics so he can get on with writing The Seven-Day Diet of Creation and Mary Magdalene Got Skinny for Jesus and You Can Too.

posted by Cacciaguida at 11:33 AM