The priest on the pope's picture.

So, the priest was saying the other day that the #3 guy in the vatican (Cardinal Rei [sp.?]), came into his office, and was asking why he didn't have any pictures of the pope up.

"The world is burning," the priest said, "and you're wondering why I don't have pictures of the pope up?".

Then, the next day, the cardinal came in and asked the same thing, and when the priest didn't say shit, later that day an Italian workman came down with some pictures and some nails, and asked where he'd like the pictures.

So, he had the picture of JP2 put up behind his desk, "Because I can't stand the sight of him," and a a picture of Jesus of Nazareth over the door, "So he can watch me coming and going."

The next day (the 3rd day), the cardinal came by and asked him about the picture of the pope, and the priest told him not to worry about it.

Then, there was a truce for like 2 months which included a period when the priest was on vacation.

As soon as he got back, he hid the pics of the pope and jesus behind a desk, and when the cardinal was in the office the next time, he asked him about it, and the priest was like, "I don't know, when i was on vacation, someone stole them," and added something about how everyone wanted them and they were in high demand.

And, that was that.

More from a Spanish friend in Spain...

I was saying how a student from my class was down in Chicago the day of the World Cup, and later when she was by the big public fountain where children wade and play, she said it was full of Spanish people with Spanish flags wrapped around them running between the kids and jumping up and down and rolling in the water.

I told this to my Spanish friend from Spain, and he said that he jumped in a fountain in his town too with some friends, and when I asked him if he was wrapped in a flag, he said no, just a jersey that he got at "the Chinese store" (another Spanish friend told me that Spaniards call local corner stores that are either run by Chinese people or carry a lot of Chinese goods, I forget which, "el chino", and I'm assuming that's what he was translating).

Addendum.

I asked the priest later in class what was it about the autobio of Teresa of Avila that attracted him to the order, and he said that it was because she was "all business, and not some pious little thing or hysterical woman."

He also said that he read it his freshman year of high school, when he was in junior seminary.

Forgot.

I forgot -

Once when I came into the apartment one evening to make dinner, Evil Me was sitting in the living room watching a recent Harry Potter movie. Other people came in, and when they were talking about the movie, he could only really talk about it by making fun of it in a knowing way - being all like, "If I had to store prophecies that are contained in glass orbs, I think I would store them in non-collapsing shelves."

How very unpleasant, to never be able to enjoy anything.

Evil redhead update...

When he was talking with someone else from my program about moving into my room, he said he snores loudly... The girl couldn't believe it, because he moved into a room with 2 other people and didn't even tell them that, he just went ahead and did it. I had originally felt kind of sorry for him since he originally had a room by himself in a shitty part of town, and when you're young you want to live with people your own age, but that's just an appalling lack of consideration for other people.

Also, in the mornings when he was reading Plato's dialogues in Greek or James Joyce's "Ulysses" over breakfast, he was chewing with his mouth open.

It never ceases to amaze me how so many Classics people think they're sophisticates, but they chew with their mouth open or talk to other people uncomfortably loudly (sometimes both at the same time!).

Anyhow, the Evil Me redhead kid stopped going to most classes, only showing up every 3 days for the "classicial texts" day. Then, he went home 2 weeks early, so he's not around anymore at all.

I think C.S. Lewis masturbated to nymphs.

A roommate of mine loaned me C.S. Lewis's spiritual memoir "Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life", which talks about how moments of unexpected, transcendent joy ultimately led him to become a Christian... One of those big sources of joy was heavily-illustrated picture-books of Norse mythology and other such fantasy books, which leads him to write this (pp. 163-4):

One thing, however, I learned, which has since saved me from many popular confusions of mind. I came to know by experience that it is not a disguise of sexual desire. Those who think that if adolescents were all provided with suitable misteresses we should soon hear no more of "immortal longings" are certainly wrong. I learned this mistake to be a mistake by the simple, if discreditable, process of repeatedly making it. From the Northernness one could not easily have slid into erotic fantasies without noticing the difference; but when the world of Morris became the frequent medium of Joy, this transition became possible. It was quite easy to think that one desired those forests for the sake of their female inhabitants, the garden of Hesperus for the sake of his daughters, Hylas' river for the river nymphs. I repeatedly followed that path - to the end. And at the end one found pleasure; which immediately resulted in the discovery that pleasure (whether that pleasure or any other) was not what you had been looking for. No moral question was involved; I was at this time as nearly non-moral on the subject as a human creature can be. The frustration did not consist in finding a "lower" pleasure instead of a "higher". It was the irrelevance of the conclusion that marred it. The hounds had changed scent. One had caught the wrong quarry. You might as well offer a mutton chop to a man who is dying of thirst as offer sexual pleasure to the desire I am speaking of. I did not recoil from the erotic conclusion with chaste horror, exclaiming, "Not that!" My feelings could rather have been expressed in the words, "Quite. I see. But haven't we wandered from the real point?" Joy is not a substitute for sex; sex is very often a substitute for Joy. I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for Joy.

Again, later (p. 197):

Now what, I asked myself, were all my delectable mountains and western gardens but sheer Fantasies? Had they not revealed their true nature by luring me, time and again, into undisguisedly erotic reverie or the squalid nightmare of Magic?

I think he left out of his memoir how he fucked this woman who was a mother-figure to him for years - to think that he'd rather talk about jacking off to nymphs as a kid than that.

More from the Priest: He slams the Germans.

One of the priest who teaches my Latin class's big pet peeves is people who think Latin stopped with Classical texts.

So, the other day he was talking about how they teach Latin composition in Germany, and that you get marked down for every word you use that isn't in Cicero's corpus, and that if you use more than 5 of them, they fail you straight out.

"There they go, goose-stepping through the Latin language," he was like.

He also said he used to have horrible fights with this one German student who, when asked why he did something, would say that his teacher taught him that, and then when the priest would adduce like 5 examples from Classical authors suggesting things should be done the other way, the guy would ignore them.

"They think those rule-books dropped from heaven!", he was like, "But they didn't."

Also, whenever someone asks him what he does and he says he's a Latinist, the typical response is usually something like, "But isn't Latin a dead language?", and more often than not he's like, "You're dead, Latin is alive."

Use of Space.

I'm very interested how different cultures can even use space differently.

"When I was in Antwerp..." (don't I sound like a jackass) one of the most interesting things I saw was in the immigrant neighborhood that had all this great Belgian architecture, and right outside an African fabric store this African woman was sitting in the shade with her back against the wall and one leg tucked up under her, just like women I had seen sitting in the Market, "When I was in West Africa..."

I was thinking of this the other day because there's this Egyptian coffee shop here in Milwaukee that makes Arabic coffee and Egyptian/Arabic-type pastries, and they have some tables out front, and the owner sits out there a lot, and the owner of the shawarma place a few places up comes down for coffee or sends one of his workers for some, and it reminded me of the comraderie (sp.?) between adjacent business owners that I saw, "When I was in Morocco..." ... Even though there is a ton of outside seating in the hipster area very near the Egyptian coffee shop, no-one was using that space like the Arabs were doing.