Islamist Sociologist Demonstrates Correct Wife-Beating Technique

Wild-Eyed Kindness!

On April 3, 2019, Special Dispatch No. 7983 reported on the 'Islamically' correct way to beat your wife, according to an expert:

On March 29, 2019, Qatari sociologist Abd Al-Aziz Al-Khazraj Al-Ansari . . . gave a demonstration and explanation about how to beat your wife in an Islamically permissible fashion. He said . . . that a man . . . must sometimes exercise his authority and discipline his wife "out of love." . . . Al-Ansari then demonstrated how to beat one's wife on Nayef – a little boy who might be his son – by slapping him on the shoulders, grabbing him and shaking him, and saying loudly: "I told you not to leave the house! How many times do I have to tell you?" Al-Ansari . . . explained that it is in some women's nature to like domineering, authoritative, violent, and powerful husbands.

There, that'll show 'em who's boss! And if that doesn't work, use a toothpick, or so I've heard said. But what if that also doesn't work? Then what? Bind several toothpicks together with dental floss and try again? And if that doesn't work? Maybe ratchet things up a notch or two by using toothbrushes?

Vampire Love

Annie Lennox

The nonsense verse of the following is my surreal poem to vampire love:

Vampire Lover

I’m a bit

in love with you,

a bit more

or

a bit less,

more or less.

But less is more,

so a little bit less

is a little bit more

and

is therefore a little bit

less and more.

I trust I have sufficiently clarified the topic of vampire love.

Franklinly Speaking, You are my everything . . .

Ben in Love?
Yes, at times . . .

Benjamin Franklin offers an unusual gradient of values:

"Poverty wants some things, Luxury many things, Avarice all things."

Franklin may be using "wants" in the sense of "lacks."

Let me add a detail to Franklin's words:

"Love wants but one thing . . . because it is everything."

I've heard-tell that Franklin would agree . . .

Wisdom Gained from Pain?

E. C. Dowson

Roses Riotously Flung

Fling them all if fling ye must, but go on them not bare of foot.

(Sigh, Nada.)

When you care enough to send the very best . . .

Hallmark

. . . but have only half the money, try Halfmark!

As the wise old adage has it . . .

Bad and Good
Attract or Attack?

. . . Opposites Attack!

Dracula: A Ladies' Man Or A Lady's Man

Mina and Dracula

Foretaste of Gory Divined

That vampire guy always did have good taste in women!

(But is it true love this time?)

Moral Hazards?

Love of Money

Google Images

Bad money drives out good . . . morals.

Actually, the proverb stopped at the word "good." I therefore asked "good what?" No answer was given. I decided "morals" worked as well as any, so I kept it.

But what is bad money?

Love is a Many-Splintered Thing

Earth
as
Oblate Spheroid

Love makes the world go round as an oblate spheroid.

What Anonymous Left Out

Home

Google Images

Home is where the heart is, you heartless bastard, so go home!

Monkey and Pigeon?

Monkey and Pigeon

Daily Mail

The novelist Victor Lodato writes an interesting article for the NYT of how he became best friends with Austin, a woman in her eighties, when he was in his early forties. Titled "When Your Greatest Romance Is a Friendship" (February 24, 2017), the article implies that their "Modern Love" remains a Platonic one, or "like one of those unlikely animal friendships: a monkey and a pigeon, perhaps" - not sexual, at any rate. Or does it imply this? Let's see:

Austin had [recently] attended a wedding. She showed me a copy of the vows, which had been distributed at the ceremony - a detailed list. I read it carefully, at Austin's bidding . . . .

"I never had anything like that with the men in my life," she said, pointing to the vows. "We loved each other, but we didn't have that." She was crying now, something she rarely did.

I took her hand and said, "Well, you have it with me. Everything but the sex."

At which point, the monkey kissed the pigeon.

That night, I had an odd realization: Some of the greatest romances of my life have been friendships. And these friendships have been, in many ways, more mysterious than erotic love: more subtle, less selfish, more attuned to kindness.

That's what Lodato writes, but what does the expression mean, "the monkey kissed the pigeon"? Is it merely something like "the groom kissed the bride"? Or more toward what that kiss is intended to lead to? And is there some weird idiomatic meaning here that I happen not to know?

War and Peaceful Domesticity

See What Careless Love Has Done

Google Images

BBC

I'm still very busy with the semester's bustling beginning, so here's another twisted proverb:

Fallen in Love

"All's fair in love and war of the sexes."

The thought occurs to me that the original version of this twisted proverb was even more twisted since there are rules of warfare.

Marius as Heathcliff?

Bad to the Bone
Google Books

I'm glad I'm not the only reader to see that Howard Jacobson was channeling Emily Brontë in his novel The Act of Love through his depiction of Marius as Heathcliff, though not in each and every respect, of course, but the resemblance is definitely there in Marius's dark good looks, rough roguish manners, and corruscating intellectual brilliance:

Marius is Much Wenlock's answer to Heathcliff, brooding and muscular. (Tim Adams, "Take my wife . . . and I wish somebody would," The Guardian, October 5, 2008)

Not that we had no assistance from Jacobson himself, for he 'hints' as much on page 41: "the Heathcliff-if-all-else-perishes rocky-eternity beneath you."

The book is morbidly fascinating and forces its readers into assuming the perversely voyeuristic perspective of the first-person narrator, Felix Quinn, manipulator par excellence who somehow brings his wife and Marius into an affair that appears headed toward disaster for all.

I say appears because I've finished all but ten percent of the novel and have yet to see how things end . . .

Coffee . . . just one more cup

Desire

Dylan
Google Images

Lately, this Dylan song has been playing in my head, partly because I listened again and again to the album Desire back in the mid- to late seventies:

"One More Cup Of Coffee"

Your breath is sweet
Your eyes are like two jewels in the sky
Your back is straight your hair is smooth
On the pillow where you lie
But I don't sense affection
No gratitude or love
Your loyalty is not to me
But to the stars above

One more cup of coffee for the road
One more cup of coffee 'fore I go.
To the valley below.

Your daddy he's an outlaw
And a wanderer by trade
He'll teach you how to pick and choose
And how to throw the blade
He oversees his kingdom
So no stranger does intrude
His voice it trembles as he calls out
For another plate of food.

One more cup of coffee for the road
One more cup of coffee 'fore I go.
To the valley below.

Your sister sees the future
Like your mama and yourself
You've never learned to read or write
There's no books upon your shelf
And your pleasure knows no limits
Your voice is like a meadowlark
But your heart is like an ocean
Mysterious and dark.

One more cup of coffee for the road
One more cup of coffee 'fore I go.
To the valley below.

But why the current mental replay? Maybe because of the mystery of life and love . . . but also because I drink so much coffee these days . . .

Love, in love . . .

Anna Akhmatova
Portrait by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin
Wikipedia

In his column "Love Story" (NYT) of May 1, 2014, David Brooks writes of Isaiah Berlin's encounter with Anna Akhmatova:

[I]n Leningrad in 1945[,] . . . . [Isaiah] Berlin was hanging out when a friend asked if he'd like to go visit Anna Akhmatova. Not knowing much about her, Berlin said yes . . . . Berlin was taken to her apartment and met a woman [twenty years older than he was, though] still beautiful and powerful, but wounded by tyranny and the war. At first, their conversation was restrained. They talked about war experiences and British universities . . . . By midnight, they were alone, sitting on opposite ends of her room. She told him about her girlhood and marriage and her husband's execution. She began to recite Byron's "Don Juan" with such passion that Berlin turned his face to the window to hide his emotions. She began reciting some of her own poems . . . . By 4 in the morning, they were talking about the greats. They agreed about Pushkin and Chekhov. Berlin liked the light intelligence of Turgenev, while Akhmatova preferred the dark intensity of Dostoyevsky[, and] . . . . [d]eeper and deeper they talked, baring their souls. Akhmatova confessed her loneliness, expressed her passions, spoke about literature and art. Berlin . . . [needed] to go to the bathroom but didn't dare break the spell. They had read all the same things, knew what the other knew, understood each other's longings. That night, . . . Berlin's life "came as close as it ever did to the still perfection of art." He finally pulled himself away and returned to his hotel. It was 11 a.m. He flung himself on the bed and exclaimed, "I am in love; I am in love."

What more can one say?

Autumn: Sidewalk of My Seoul

Sun-Ae and I were out walking along a street near our apartment a couple of days ago when she stopped to capture the moment. Leaves were falling as she took this photo, but they seem to have evaded the lens, perhaps embarrassed to be caught in the moment of their fall, though that would have been of little moment.

Later, I was reading something the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, had said about the "sense of absolute immersion in the richness of the moment" that somehow encompasses us at certain moments in our reading, and I thought, "How rare that is," not an experience we can strive for and attain, but something that happens to us, like falling in love, rare moments when even Faust would have uttered those fateful words, "Verweile doch, du bist so schön."

Happy 17th Anniversary, Sun-Ae!

Sun-Ae on Cheonmasan
South Korea, 2012

I don't know precisely why Sun-Ae agreed to marry me, but she did, and I've been happy our seventeen years of marriage, plus the three years prior to that, making 20 years of happiness for me . . . and I hope for her, as well.

From a man hopeless in love to a man hopelessly in love . . . within the space of a few minutes on a train.

Thank-you, Sun-Ae, for making me so happy, still now, so many years later . . .

Zündholzfabrik

Zündholzfabrik

(Image from Jugendherberge)

Some readers will recall the story of how I met my wife on a train. Not like the character in Ionesco's Bald Soprano who meets his wife on a train:

Mr. Martin: Madam, I took the 8:30 morning train which arrives in London at 4:45.

Mrs. Martin: That is curious! How very bizarre! And what a coincidence! I took the same train, sir, I too.

After a series of other bizarre 'coincidences,' e.g., living in the same flat and having a daughter with the same name, they conclude that they are husband and wife:

Mr. Martin: Then, dear lady, I believe that there can be no doubt about it, we have seen each other before and you are my own wife.

One of the other characters in the play does call this 'indubious' conclusion into doubt, but let us leave Mr. and Mrs. Martin happily married, for any state of affairs can be doubted by the most skeptical of skeptics, and if the Martins are not man and wife, then my own 'coincidental' meeting with my wife on a train might not inevitably lead to the conclusion that she is my wife.

But to the best of my memory, I met my wife -- though she was, of course, not yet my wife -- on a train to Lauenberg, Germany, for we were 'coincidentally' headed for the same Naumann-Stiftung orientation seminar to be held at the Zündholzfabrik, or translated into English, the Matchstick Factory. Apparently, matches were once made there.

The place seems to have retained a bit of its productive capacity, for it managed to produce another match, and one quickly struck, too, lighting a fire that still burns 18 years later, so our match must have been fated, designed, even if seen only through a glass, darkly:

At times, that match we kindled sorely sticks,
To burn within our craw, if we eat crow,
But most we glimpse the lines of that fabric's
Uncanny dark design we've sought to know.

We wandered down a street and saw a sign,
You took my hand in yours, to my surprise,
Then let it drop as if disdained design
Were little more than worthless alibis.

But later, when rejoined, that match to bless,
'Twixt two of us, by matchless deity,
That altar was a bloody, lovely mess
For you and me, if devil making three.

Or was it just we two, and no one else,
I and your own, most obscure, secret self's.

The devil's ever in the details, and there are always things to be worked through and out, but our marriage match seems to have been made in the heavens even if necessarily lived down to earth.

My "aye" and her "aye" in the "I do, I do" of marriage, and this has been a "Poetry Break" for the apple of my eye, who will understand it even when no one else does . . .

Adam Smith and Jane Austen: On Love and Resentment?

Adam Smith

Resentful but not Judgmental?

(Image from Adam Smith Institute)

I've finished the first draft of my article, which I've titled "Darcy’s Ardent Love and Resentful Temper in Pride and Prejudice," so here's my introduction:

In 1759, Adam Smith wrote in Part 3 of his Theory of Moral Sentiments that "Love does not judge of resentment, nor resentment of love. Those two passions may be opposite to one another, but cannot, with any propriety, be said to approve or disapprove of one another" (192). Kenneth Moler has argued that Smith's work on the sentiments exerted an influence on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, written some 40 years later (567-9). Similarly, Peter Knox-Shaw examines Elizabeth Bennet's query, "Is not general incivility [toward others than the beloved] the very essence of love?" and finds in it an echo of Smith's observation in Moral Sentiments (Pt. 1) that "though a lover may be good company to his mistress, he is so to nobody else" (87-88, n. 44). On the incivility of lovers, Smith and Austen would seem to agree, but influence by one writer on another can be found as readily in disagreement as agreement. Despite her apparent agreement with Smith on some points, would Austen accept Smith's views on love and resentment, namely, that neither can judge the other?

I'll leave you wondering about that (though you surely know the answer!). By the way, my three sources are:

Knox-Shaw, Peter. Jane Austen and the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Moler, Kenneth L. "The Bennet Girls and Adam Smith on Vanity and Pride." Philological Quarterly 46 (1967), 567-9.

Smith, Adam, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Edited by Knud Haakonssen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Those are for any readers who themselves might wish to follow up on this issue. Sorry that this is short and possibly tantilizing -- though more likely boring -- but I slept late and need to get on with proofing and touching up this first draft.

Superbia and Vanagloria in Austen's Pride and Prejudice

Character Map

to

Jane Austen's

Pride and Prejudice

Click Map to Enlarge

(Image from Wikipedia)

A more developed character map than the one above would need to be dynamic to illustrate the changing relationships as, for example, Elizabeth Bennet's dislike and resentment toward Darcy turn to gratitude and love. Such a map would also need a summary of the various characters' personal traits, such as Darcy's excessive pride (and slight shading of vanity?) -- but also reveal the humbling of that pride by Elizabeth.

With respect to these character traits, I've used the Latin terms superbia and vanagloria for "pride" and "vanity" in today's blog heading because I want to recall that these two categories of vice have a long intellectual history in Christian thought. These were originally two of the eight evil thoughts distinguished by the fourth century monk Evagrius Ponticus in his treatise De octo spiritibus malitiae (The Eight Spirits of Wickedness, original Greek: Περὶ τῶν οκτῶ πνευμάτων τῆς πονηρίας). These eight evil thoughts eventually developed into the seven deadly sins, partly due to Pope Gregory I (aka Gregory the Great), who joined superbia and vanagloria into the single sin of pride in the late sixth century. The thirteenth-century Thomas Aquinas follows Gregory I in considering pride the root of all vices, but he separates vanity from pride, listing vanity as one of the seven deadly sins and arguing that pride lies at the root of each of the seven. Most lists of the seven that I've seen in English, however, contain pride rather than vanity (vanity being considered an aspect of pride).

I'm not sure that Jane Austen would have been aware of these specific developments in the history of Christian thought, given her lack of a formal education, but she did read widely and was concerned to distinguish pride from vanity even while recognizing their similarity. In chapter 5 of Pride and Prejudice, the somewhat priggish Mary Bennet makes a useful distinction:

"Pride," observed Mary, who piqued herself upon the solidity of her reflections, "is a very common failing, I believe. By all that I have ever read, I am convinced that it is very common indeed; that human nature is particularly prone to it, and that there are very few of us who do not cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some quality or other, real or imaginary. Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us."

Mary's observations are ignored, but Jane Austen uses them cleverly to raise some issue and make some distinctions. These two themes of "pride" and "vanity" are returned to again later in the story, in chaper 11, when Elizabeth tells Darcy that she finds follies, nonsense, whims, and inconsistencies diverting and enjoys laughing at them whenever possible, adding, "But these, I suppose, are precisely what you are without."

"Perhaps that is not possible for anyone. But it has been the study of my life to avoid those weaknesses which often expose a strong understanding to ridicule."

"Such as vanity and pride."

"Yes, vanity is a weakness indeed. But pride -- where there is a real superiority of mind, pride will be always under good regulation."

Elizabeth turned away to hide a smile.

Presumably, she smiles because she finds either folly, nonsense, whim, or inconsistency in Darcy's statement, probably the fourth item in this series, for Darcy's assurance that he has his pride "under good regulation" surely strikes her as manifestly inconsistent with his regular display of pride, as well as being a rather proud thing to say in any case.

Moreover, Darcy's pride is not well regulated by his superior mind. It only comes under better regulation through his love for Elizabeth, for rather than falling into a profound, bitter resentment that would merely serve to increase his injured pride upon being rejected by her, he writes her a letter that closes with an "adieu [that] is charity itself" and is taught by his love to feel the opposite of resentment, a sense of gratitude toward her for a moral lesson well learned, as he informs her himself in chapter 58:

What do I not owe you! You taught me a lesson, hard indeed at first, but most advantageous. By you, I was properly humbled. I came to you without a doubt of my reception. You showed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased.

And, interestingly, he admits in that same address and shortly thereafter to having had both of the faults "pride" and "vanity." He then goes on to say that upon their later chance encounter at his estate, he had striven by every civility in his power to show her that he "was not so mean as to resent the past," by which he meant her past refusal of his first marriage proposal.

Austen thus seems keen to encourage the cultivation of virtues, so I am puzzled by her nephew's remark in his biography of her that her novels "certainly were not written to . . . inculcate any particular moral . . . except indeed the great moral . . . namely, the superiority of high over low principles, and of greatness over littleness of mind" (Austen-Leigh, Memoir, page 153). I don't dispute that she was doing the latter, but I think that she was doing the former as well, i.e., inculcating particular moral virtues.