My brother at his best.

"The North isn't a place. It's just a direction out of the South."

Some quotes on one of my favourite subjects: the South.

"The biggest myth about Southern women is that we are frail types--fainting on our sofas...nobody where I grew up ever acted like that. We were about as fragile as coal trucks."
--Lee Smith

"...People just showed up and were always made welcome. To stay less than an hour was an insult, and there was always a meal...and nobody was ever let out of the house without the goodbye ritual..."
----Shirley Abbot

"Southerners have a genius for psychological alchemy...If something intolerable simply cannot be changed, driven away or shot they will not only tolerate it but take pride in it as well."
-- Florence King

"Recognizing that it certainly isn't true of all of us, I would propose that a Southerner is distinguished by a sense of neighborliness, a garrulous quality, a wish to get together a lot."
--from Charles Kuralt in "Southerners: Portrait of a People"

"Within the South itself, no other form of cultural expression, not even music, is as distinctively characteristic of the region as the spreading of a feast of native food and drink before a gathering of kin and friends."
-- John Egerton, from "Southern Food, at Home, on the Road, in History"

"What can be more Southern than to obsess about being Southern?"
--Elizabeth Fortson Arroyo

"Southerners can't stand to eat alone. If we're going to cook a mess of greens we want to eat them with a mess of people."
--Julia Reed

"In the South, the breeze blows softer...neighbors are friendlier, nosier, and more talkative. (By contrast with the Yankee, the Southerner never uses one word when ten or twenty will do)...This is a different place. Our way of thinking is different, as are our ways of seeing, laughing, singing, eating, meeting and parting. Our walk is different, as the old song goes, our talk and our names. Nothing about us is quite the same as in the country to the north and west. What we carry in our memories is different too, and that may explain everything else."
--Charles Kuralt in "Southerners: Portrait of a People"

"Those politicians are going up fool's hill on the slippery side."

"Be careful not to run your mouth before you put your mind in gear. You can apologise all you want afterwards, but it's like shutting the barn door after the horse gets out."

"Hungry is a mighty fine sauce."

"Folks who get all caught up in themselves sure do make small packages."

"It is easy to pick up and move when the culture you know is all McDonald's. But if you grow up the way I did in Louisiana, you don't in your travels find anything like it. Some of it is the cuisine, but mostly it is a mind-set." --Glenn Petre

Jael kills Sisera

Two Things

1. I've had an apostrophe. I thought of a great name for my pub: 'The Axe and Tree: the public house of St. Boniface'. Did you know he's the patron saint of brewers? I thought it would be neat to have part of that passage from John (you know, where the axe is laid at the root of the tree?) done up over the doorway. Isn't it great?

2. Quote from Wendell Berry. He makes me feel quasi-normal:
'She would do a man's work when she needed to, but she lived and died without ever putting on a pair of pants. She wore dresses. Being a widow, she wore them black. Being a woman of her time, she wore them long. The girls of her day, I think, must have been like well-wrapped gifts, to be opened by their husbands on their wedding night, a complete surprise. "Well! What's this?"'

Brave woman, that.

I've never heard anything like this before. I've heard the 'good stewardship' argument, but nothing this in-depth. And Mrs. Colvin is right: nowhere does God give mankind stewardship over mankind. Other than to command us to multiply and fill the earth, that is.

_____________
In other news, I'm reading Moll Flanders. She is, I think, what Mrs. Badgermum would call a 'shameless hussy'. I'm about sixty pages from the end, and so far: she's been married five times (once to her half-brother, accidently), a mistress twice, had 10 children (half survived childhood), and stolen enough to make a small fortune-- and she's only forty-five years old. The woman is incredible, in the original (Latin) sense of the word. On the other hand, I learned a new word for harlot: trull.

The English literature is sinking in...

I was just listening to an account of the life of Boniface (patron saint of brewers, by the way), and do you know what happened? I heard the lecturer say that Boniface refused his inheritance in order to become a monk and I thought,'He can't do that, he's the firstborn son!'

Ha! Take that, egalitarianism!

Books I've Read

So far this calendar year, I've read only 12 books. I am very disappointed, considering 1. that I didn't read any books in March (what was I thinking?), 2. that last year at this time I had read 30 books already, and 3. that the year before at this time I had read 22 books. I've got a lot of catching up to do.

Before I do that, though, I thought I'd post something interesting (to me, at least). So. Here's some book lists:

What I Read in April a.d. 2004
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass- Lewis Carroll
The Lord of the Flies- William Golding (this book was terrible)
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and other short stories- Washington Irving
Coming Up for Air- George Orwell

What I Read in April a.d. 2005
Short Stories- J.F. Powers (bad author; uninteresting stories)
Henry and the Great Society- H.L. Roush
The Golden Key- George MacDonald
Miniatures and Morals- Peter Leithart
The Vanishing American Outhouse- Ronald S. Barlow
Dutch Colors- Douglas Jones
Scottish Seas- Douglas Jones
Huguenot Gardens- Douglas Jones
Summary of Christian Doctrine- Louis Berkhof
Memoirs of a Geisha- Arthur Golden
River Town- Peter Hessler
The Legacy of Biblical Womanhood- Susan Hunt and Barbara Thompson
The Ragamuffin Gospel- Brennan Manning
Future Men- Douglas Wilson

And...
What I Read April a.d. 2006
Q's Legacy- Helene Hanff
The Sunday Philosophy Club- Alexander McCall Smith (all the rage, but not really a good story)
The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency- Alexander McCall Smith (ditto)
Right Ho, Jeeves- P.G. Wodehouse

There. Now, to read.