Category: Culture

I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing

A character in one of my wife, Martha’s, favorite books makes the observation that one proof of the divine life of the Catholic church is that it has survived so much bad art and music. Bad hymns have always been with us, but I find many of the new "praise chorus" type of songs to be especially mind-numbing.

The other day I was trying to figure out why this was so and, among other things, I realized that there is no harmony to the current songs we use in our local church. None. Melody lines only.

Now, I am an adult convert, so I don’t know if maybe some of you cradle Catholics might remember harmonizing at Mass. When I was a li’l Baptist, singing in harmony just happened naturally. Men took up the bass or baritone, usually, with women and kids grabbing the tenor or soprano parts. Not that we sounded great or anything, but it was kind of neat.

Along with the fact that many of these new songs’ lyrics and melodies sound like they came from a Barney episode, the lack of harmony helps to make them really, well, boring.

There is also another aspect I’ve just recently noted that I will tell you about in the form of the following Song Parody, sung to the tune of "One Bread, One Body"…

One note, for each word,

One syllable,

One melody that’s sung by all.

And we, though many, here in this church,

We all are singing just this one note.

I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing

A character in one of my wife, Martha’s, favorite books makes the observation that one proof of the divine life of the Catholic church is that it has survived so much bad art and music. Bad hymns have always been with us, but I find many of the new "praise chorus" type of songs to be especially mind-numbing.

The other day I was trying to figure out why this was so and, among other things, I realized that there is no harmony to the current songs we use in our local church. None. Melody lines only.

Now, I am an adult convert, so I don’t know if maybe some of you cradle Catholics might remember harmonizing at Mass. When I was a li’l Baptist, singing in harmony just happened naturally. Men took up the bass or baritone, usually, with women and kids grabbing the tenor or soprano parts. Not that we sounded great or anything, but it was kind of neat.

Along with the fact that many of these new songs’ lyrics and melodies sound like they came from a Barney episode, the lack of harmony helps to make them really, well, boring.

There is also another aspect I’ve just recently noted that I will tell you about in the form of the following Song Parody, sung to the tune of "One Bread, One Body"…

One note, for each word,

One syllable,

One melody that’s sung by all.

And we, though many, here in this church,

We all are singing just this one note.

H. P. LOVECRAFT: Artist!

Lovecraft describes some pretty weird monsters in his fiction. The most famous is Cthulhu, which he describes as looking like a cross between a man, a dragon, and an octopus.

In the story The Call of Cthulhu, Lovecraft mentions an apparent voodoo cult in Lousiana that has a small, pre-human statuette of Cthulhu that they use in their rites. When the police bust up and arrest members of the group, they get the statuette, which is then taken to a meeting of archaeologists in a vain attempt to identify it.

Lovecraft describes the statue this way:

The figure . . . was between seven and eight inches in height, and of exquisitely artistic workmanship. It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind.

This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters.

The tips of the wings touched the back edge of the block, the seat occupied the centre, whilst the long, curved claws of the doubled-up, crouching hind legs gripped the front edge and extended a quarter of the way clown toward the bottom of the pedestal. The cephalopod head was bent forward, so that the ends of the facial feelers brushed the backs of huge fore paws which clasped the croucher’s elevated knees.

The aspect of the whole was abnormally life-like, and the more subtly fearful because its source was so totally unknown. Its vast, awesome, and incalculable age was unmistakable; yet not one link did it shew with any known type of art belonging to civilisation’s youth – or indeed to any other time.

Totally separate and apart, its very material was a mystery; for the soapy, greenish-black stone with its golden or iridescent flecks and striations resembled nothing familiar to geology or mineralogy.

The characters along the base were equally baffling; and no member present, despite a representation of half the world’s expert learning in this field, could form the least notion of even their remotest linguistic kinship. They, like the subject and material, belonged to something horribly remote and distinct from mankind as we know it. something frightfully suggestive of old and unhallowed cycles of life in which our world and our conceptions have no part.

Now, since reading the story, I’ve had my own mental image of what the statuette looks like (though I must say that I have a tendency to forget that it’s supposed to be made of greenish-black stone and imagine it as being made of straight black stone instead).

I’ve wondered, though, what mental image Lovecraft had of the statue. He was no artist (despite the fact I just said he was in the title of this post), but he did once draw a picture of it in a letter to his friend F. Lee Baldwin. Here it is:

WARNING! IMPENDING VISAGE OF ELDER COSMIC MADNSS THAT MAY SHATTER YOUR SANITY! VIEWER DISCRETION ADVISED! THIS IMAGE CONTAINS MATERIAL KNOWN TO THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA TO CAUSE INSANITY!

Continue reading “H. P. LOVECRAFT: Artist!”

Music Bleg For WYD

I recently got the following e-mail under the subject heading "could you please post this?"

Live to serve, so: <Rule 15 Suspension>Stephen Tefft</Rule 15 Suspension> writes:

Mr, Akin,

I am a Catholic singer/songwriter whose praise and worship band, Cor Sanctum (www.corsanctum.com), has been invited to perform at World Youth Day in Germany this Summer. My bandmates and I took a chance, sent a couple of our CD’s in to the organizers and were informed that we made the final cut, beating out almost 600 other bands world-wide. Now we have to, somehow, find the "sufficient funding" to be able to go.

We are not asking for donations, although they would be greatly appreciated. We are asking for prayers first and foremost. We are also asking that people visit our website (www.corsanctum.com), check out our musical offerings, and perhaps purchase a CD or two.

When one thinks about how much money one typically spends on entertainment… movies, CD’s, etc… I don’t think it too much to ask to use a small portion to help out a small Catholic praise band trying to use their talents for God’s greater glory. And get a wonderful CD of good Catholic praise and worship music to enjoy.

Could you, please, take a little time to check out our website? All our recorded music is available to listen to on-line.

Being accepted to World Youth Day is a HUGE opportunity for us. Please help us get the word out about our band…

Thank you and God bless.

Stephen M. Tefft
www.corsanctum.com

GET THE MUSIC.

Million Dollar Movie

The movie Million Dollar Baby walked away with far too many Oscars this year, what with it bein’ a pro-euthanasia flick an’ all.

The Passion of the Christ deserved best pic, not this flick.

(EARTH TO HOLLYWOOD!!! HELLOOOOOOO!!!)

Some try to defend Million Dollar Baby on the grounds that, despite its problematic euthanasia message, "It’s just a movie."

Not Ed Peters.

GET THE STORY.

Lovecraft Enters The American Canon

Lovecraft The mad Arab Abdul Alhazred (a.k.a. H. P. Lovecraft) has had a volume published by the Library of America, a prestigious non-profit publisher devoted to preserving the works of America’s greatest writers.

In the judgment of author Michael Dirda, that means he’s entered the American canon.

GET THE STORY.

(Cowboy hat tip to the reader who pointed it out!)

Excerpts:

NO FULL UNDERSTANDING OF MODERN literature is possible without taking into account an exceedingly peculiar, self-educated, semi-recluse from Providence named Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

That is a conclusion no one, including Lovecraft himself, would have predicted. As he was dying in 1937 at age forty-six, he may well have felt he had lived in vain. His stories–sixty or seventy works of various lengths and completeness–resided in scattered notebooks and throwaway pulp magazines, uncollected and unlikely to be remembered.

But it now seems beyond dispute that H.P. Lovecraft is the most important American writer of weird fiction in the twentieth century–and one of the century’s most influential writers of any kind of fiction. His admirers range from the Argentine fabulist Jorge Luis Borges to such contemporary masters of darkness as Stephen King and Neil Gaiman. Each year winners of the "World Fantasy Award" take home a trophy modeled on Lovecraft’s gaunt, lantern-jawed face. Nearly every author of supernatural fiction and dark fantasy sooner or later tries his hand at a Lovecraftian homage or pastiche.

The article contains some good analysis of Lovecraft’s literary work, but it also contains information on Lovecraft’s private side:

Lovecraft–under-sexed, neurasthenic, a Mama’s boy–actually got married in 1924, to a Jewish woman who described him, mirabile dictu, as "an adequately excellent lover." The couple resided in hated New York City for two years, until the marriage broke up and Lovecraft happily moved back home to Providence. In his later years, this once wholly introspective voyager traveled all around eastern America, from Quebec to New Orleans, from Cleveland to Key West.

He actually competed in an ice-cream eating contest and was reportedly offered the editorship of a periodical called the Magazine of Fun. He remained an almost literally starving writer, however, with so little income at one point that he ate his suppers out of cans, being unable to afford a stove. A typical dinner might consist of cold hot dogs, biscuits, and mayonnaise. Lovecraft died from cancer in 1937: forty-six years old and apparently doomed to be forgotten.

I can sympathize with Lovecraft’s poverty, as there was a time in grad school when I was so dirt poor in Arkansas that we were in constant danger of being evicted from our apartment, we couldn’t afford much-needed medicine, dollar packs of hot dogs were a principle means of subsistence, and cheese was something I regarded as "rich man’s food." I well remember picking loose change out of the couch to try to get enough coins that my wife and I could go to the market for a pack of hot dogs and a can of frozen lemonade, which would represent all the food we’d have to eat, ’cause the cupboard was bare.

Another summer (before I was married), I was so poor that all I could afford to eat was 17 cent boxes of low-quality, generic, Always Save Macaroni & Cheese–every single day. While macaroni & cheese had previously been a favorite dish, I couldn’t stand the thought of eating it for several years afterward.

Something that the article doesn’t mention is that Lovecraft’s friend, correspondent, and fellow weird fiction author Clark Ashton Smith (whom Lovecraft referred to as Klarkash-Ton) attributed Lovecraft’s death to malnutrition. Apparently Lovecraft was so impoverished that at certain points he was subsisting on food costing only $1.40 a week (a ridiculously small sum even in the 1930s).

Perhaps it was severe malnutrition that weakened his immune system enough to allow his stomach cancer to develop.

Bitterly ironic that a man who ate so little would be killed by a disease that gave him intense stomach pains.

Even more bitter is the fact that Lovecraft would have made more money if he had written more fiction, but criticism of his work demoralized him as a writer, keeping him from writing as much as he otherwise would have.

Now he’s considered one of the giants of 20th century American literature.

I still don’t buy his thesis that the universe is vast and uncaring and doesn’t give a whit about puny men.

God still loves H. P. Lovecraft.

Music Copying Re-Redux

A reader from another country writes:

This is another of those music copying questions. There was an old recording of a book on LP in the 1970’s (I think). As far as I know, the record is no longer for sale. You can buy second hand versions at some cost over the internet, but they seem to be very limited in number.

Anyway, a man has put mp3’s of his old LP on the internet. He’s not selling them and says he’ll remove the files if they’re ever re-released by the record company. In this situation, is it licit to download these files, with the knowledge that the quality is poor and that no-one is being deprived of their fair wages from it? A person I know has made a CD of the mp3 files for me and I would like to hear them, but I don’t want to steal!

Not wanting to steal is the right attitude to have! Kudos!

Unfortunately, I don’t know what the law in your country (which shall remain nameless) would say about whether or not this is stealing.

Let me therefore prescind from the legal question to look at the moral question. As we covered in The Moral Question, the sin of theft is "usurping another’s property against the reasonable will of the owner" (CCC 2408).

Let’s ask, therefore, whether it would be against the reasonable will of the owner to object to you downloading these .mp3s:

  1. Since the work is not in print at the moment, you have no way of purchasing it in such a way that the copyright holder(s) would receive compensation. Even buying the book from a used book service or the records from a used record shop would not get them a royalty. Therefore, they therefore could not reasonably object to your downloading them on the grounds that you are presently depriving them of a royalty.
  2. They could, however, reasonably object that by downloading them you would be undercutting the market for them should they decide to put them back in print at some point in the future. If you already have a copy, you don’t need to buy a new one, and so they could miss a royalty from you that they would otherwise get at some future date. This is a reasonable objection.
  3. You can meet this objection by making a commitment (a real, solid commitment, that is, not a phoney-baloney one) to buy the product should it be put on the market again (assuming that you’re not destitute and they’re not charging outrageous sums for it).
  4. You can strengthen this by committing to making a good faith effort to buy the product if it is ever re-issued in any form (e.g., if it comes out as a book but not an audiobook then you buy the book so that they get their royalties).
  5. It seems to me that, if you really make a firm commitment to make a good faith effort to buy the product so they can get their royalties that their objection to the undercutting-the-market argument becomes unreasonable, at least in your case. (It would not be unreasonable in the case of many people who might make phoney-baloney commitments to buy the product if it is reissued). In such a case, your action in downloading the files would not appear to be the sin of theft.

What the civil law may say about the matter, I couldn’t tell you, but in terms of the moral law that the action would not count as the sin of theft if done under the conditions just named.