Erstwhile Okie on Saint Mark's Place. Frustrated novelist, satisfied father.
Miltoning, sometimes described as the art of not writing Paradise Lost before fifty.
On this Day
HANK: Bobby, I never thought I'd need to tell you this, but I would be a bad parent if I didn't. Soccer was invented by European ladies to keep them busy while their husbands did the cooking.
BOBBY: Why do you have to hate what you don't understand?
HANK: I don't hate you, Bobby.
BOBBY: I meant soccer.
HANK: Oh. Oh, yeah, I hate soccer. Yes.
Hot cocoa on a snowy windy morning.
#BooksOf2025
3. Mary Magdalene: Women, the Church, and the Great Deception
6/10
GOOD: Brief, accessible, and interesting points
BAD: Feels a bit cursory; an assemblage of proofs of a point that doesn't need much proof
Not thrilled to be sharing only my third book of the year well into March! In fact, February was dominated by The Thin Red Line, with which I was nearly finished when Lent arrived and I decided to only read explicitly Christian literature until Easter.
At any rate, this little volume had caught my eye in The Strand a while back, so I picked it up.
At its heart, the book critiques the denial of authority of women in the Church, pointing to Mary Magdalene as the first Apostle; having been the first to proclaim the news of Christ's resurrection. Interwoven is an examination of the conflation of unnamed women in the Gospel with her, making her, in church tradition, a prostitute though this is not a Biblical view.
That's really about it, but the point is illustrated by various gnostic texts and apocrypha (new to me was the x-rated Greater Questions of Mary.)
Quick and interesting read, but probably not especially memorable.
No idea why this stupid, inane thing had me laughing until I cried.
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=FwRRt-LpJoA
Walked into the Harry Potter Store amid a light drizzle and somehow emerged to find a blizzard.
Rewarded myself after a long visit to the dentist yesterday with a trip to the Strand. Mostly to look for a copy of Strong's Concordance, which they didn't have, but in the section where it would have been, this little book on Mary Magdalene caught my eye (my interest kindled from the recent read of HOLY BLOOD HOLY GRAIL). Then I had the idea to buy a French novel to see if throwing myself into the deep end might bear any fruit. It's interesting to slowly crawl over a sentence as one might when one is four years old.
Had a birthday dinner with a thirteen-year-old at the River Cafe last night.
#BooksOf2025
2. Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln
6/10
GOOD: Fascinating history from a number of discrete periods
BAD: Since debunked; Silly logical contortions to align with the desired conclusion
I'm going to be in Paris in May for meetings and wanted to take advantage of being on the continent by squeezing in some culture. Somehow I heard of a basilica in the South of France where Mary Magdalene's purported skull is displayed inside of a golden body. Evidently, there's a monastery with spartan accommodations to host pilgrims who then have to hike through the woods to access it. It seemed interesting, like something the characters in an Italian neorealist movie would do.
I mentioned it to a friend who referenced this book and some complex conspiracy about Mary Magdalene having been married to Christ and borne his children and carried the Holy bloodline to France. Popularly known more recently as the underlying conspiracy of The Da Vinci Code. So I bought the book and dove in.
It begins with the story of a priest in the late 1800s having been assigned to a tiny parish in the South of France. He eventually refuses the Church's order to be moved to another parish, seems to exhibit a sudden great wealth, behaves strangely, and finds hidden ancient parchments left by a Knight of the Crusades.
From there we try to establish that the famous Knights Templar were patronized by a secret society later connected to a particular Frankish royal family which lost power but seemed to have many prominent descendants in later centuries behind many major historical events.
SPOILER ALERT: This royal line was sired by Jesus, who was just a man, and if it is ever restored, it will unite Jews, Christians, and Muslims as the human view of Jesus is acceptable to all.
It's a pretty dense book, and they work through each step of this methodically. Much of their source material has, in the forty-plus years since publication, been debunked as fraudulent, but while they contort and connect and make spurious leaps, they do it all over a background of well-researched and interesting history. I learned a lot about the Knights Templar, and the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and the history of Franks and France and Visigoths. I also learned a lot about the Holy Grail (for instance that the word 'grail' has no other meaning than to refer to the Holy Grail...) and the literature around it.
But the part of it I enjoyed the most was the Biblical criticism. I consider myself a Christian Fundamentalist, and genuinely hold the admittedly absurd and indefensible view that the Bible is literally true and inerrant. But if you really believe in something you should be comfortable with it being assailed.
Reading about the Roman Emperor Diocletian's role in destroying much of the Christian Canon was fascinating, and I find arguments that the established Gospel was molded to be acceptable to Roman authorities compelling. There are also some compelling arguments that Jesus was not a humble carpenter but a well-to-do and well-connected member of an established Messianic line. Even relatively minor arguments that, for instance, the beloved disciple of the Gospel of John was not John, but Lazarus, were fascinating.
So on the whole, I don't ascribe a lot of value to the book, but it proved as fun a way as any to learn about topics I might not otherwise have been exposed to. And I admire a peripheral stated goal which is to united discrete scientific disciplines in the pursuit of truth. There's an aside about that I found thought-provoking:
"Why, then, had the fragments of the puzzle not hitherto been assembled into a coherent whole? [...] Since the so-called Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, the orientation of Western culture and consciousness has been toward analysis rather than synthesis. As a result our age is one of ever-increasing specialization... In consequence the diverse spheres covered by our inquiry have traditionally been segmented into quite separate compartments... [F]ew experts on the Grail romances have been historians... Similarly historians of the Templars and the Crusades have, like all historians, adhered closely to "factual" records and documents... To suggest to such a historian that the Grail romances might contain a kernel of historical truth would be tantamount to heresy, even though Schliemann, more than a century ago, discovered the site of Troy by dint of careful reading of Homer."
I love this as a defense of "fiction" as often being a greater aid of truth than "non-fiction" and as an exploration of what truth is generally.
Fauna
#BooksOf2025
1. Less by Andrew Sean Greer
5.5/10
GOOD: Funny, engaging, well-written
BAD: Blow-by-blow from a single perspective, self-indulgent
Finished my first novel of 2025 last night (though I read the majority of it in 2024). Less by Andrew Sean Greer. It was fine. Engaging and fun and a few very funny lines, eg:
His first response to Peter was to ask: "How did they even know I was gay?" He asked this from his front porch, wearing a kimono.
The fact that it's not dissimilar from stuff I've written and gotten nowhere with, and that it won the Pulitzer probably played no small part in engendering some bitterness... But it also does the thing that I used to love and can't stand anymore, which is to paint as realistic a world in which literary novelists have any sort of recognition or relevance.
The protagonist, Arthur Less, is an aging novelist, and a minor one by all accounts, who finds fans among the working class he encounters in different countries. It's writer porn. By writers and for writers.
There's also an under-developed thread that turns out, in the end, to be the big pay-off, which felt a bit pat and uninteresting.
I'm also a bit squeamish with male physical intimacy, and there's that throughout the book, though it's perfectly tasteful, but it probably didn't help its chances of winning me over.
When I first moved into my little studio on E. 9th Street in November of 2021, I kept things pretty spartan for quite awhile. Slowly started populating the space with Facebook Marketplace deals, and things like this that I encountered on the sidewalk on evening walks through the neighborhood.
This little table fit my space perfectly and became my desk. Then, when I bought my younger son a fancy PC for his birthday, I sawed out the crossbeam and moved it back to fit the tower.
I even moved the thing to my new apartment and put it in my son's bedroom closet. But after Christmas, he got other furniture for the closet and there was really no place for it, so today, it went back to the street from whence it came.
I hope it gets another chapter.
For something like 15 years now, I've kept a daily diary, using Leather Gallery's Desk Weekly Leather Planner (Open Format) - 8" x 5.5". Last night, I stuck 2024's on a pile in a cabinet and set pen to 2025's for the first time, starting the January first entry: The scene opens.
I went on to detail where the night found me, broadly, which painted a pretty positive picture in terms of all the metrics generally regarded as meaningful. I could write endlessly about God's endless indulgence and providence towards me; I've been hurling myself off increasingly tall cliffs and landing in the beds of increasingly luxuriant marshmallow-and-goose-down trucks for a long time. I'm very lucky and increasingly focused on being happy with my luck rather than fearful.
If I took any particular lesson from 2024 (other than constant reminders that I am of more value than many sparrows and will never get stones in lieu of bread), it is that many of the foundational attributes I ascribed to myself -- anxiety, sadness, laziness -- were either misattributed or not-particularly-relevant derivatives of my real core quality: cowardice.
Which is a promising diagnosis, as I think it has more ready remedies than the others. Namely, patience and gratitude (or patience, experience, and hope).
I'm always grateful for fatherhood as it provides such great illustrations of God's perspective. It annoys me when my sons worry about things that are far beyond them and really only my concern. The affordability of something, managing certain details, etc... And it saddens me to see how it can dampen what should be a purely positive experience I've afforded them.
It's been a mad rush since Christmas Eve, so this is quite belated, and many clever-er men than me have made the observation better than I can, but it really struck me at the candlelight service, in this grand ornate sanctuary on Broadway, wealthy and homeless alike singing praises to a savior born two millennia ago to peasants.
Morning hike at Bear Mountain. Unexpected sighting of the Manhattan Skyline. Bit crowded.
In church this past Sunday, the Psalm reading came from Psalm 90. One line of it struck me: Make us glad according to the days wherein thou hast afflicted us. The bit that struck me was in the idea that God afflicts us.
I read and enjoyed a book recently, recommended to me by my church rector: The Will of God by Leslie D. Weatherhead. The basis of it is to critique those that might, in the midst of suffering, say that it is God's will; that it is never God's will for us to suffer, but that in our liberty, we are not restrained from acts of which the natural consequence is suffering.
While I think this view has a lot to commend itself and affords us a concept of a loving God better aligned with our earthly definition of love, it replaces a God who would intentionally injure us with One who merely lets us be injured. I think both have downsides.
Either way, the verse in question leaves no doubt in a straightforward reading that God does not just let us be afflicted, He afflicts us.
It might be splitting hairs, but I personally favor a God who, seeing me running into traffic would snatch and beat me rather than watch on, determined to let me learn my lesson naturally, even if the injuries were equal in either scenario.
I don't know why I felt compelled to write about this, but I did, and in doing, went to review the Psalm in full and was struck further by how the line that had first caught my attention actually ranks pretty low in the litany of active cruelties described.
Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children of men... (read: An older sibling: "stop hitting yourself!")
I was struck too by Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God. but for no reason other than that it brough to mind Job; God demanding of him Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?
So it seemed especially interesting that Psalm 90 is, by tradition, the only Psalm attributed to Moses, making it the earliest, which again parallels Job, as that book is similarly cited as being the earliest written book of scripture.
What does it mean that the earliest question posed by man was why we suffer? And what does it mean that both Job and Moses, who had direct interactions with the Almighty, understood the answer to be that He willed it so?
Beats me.
But it has gotten me thinking about how dismissively I approach the Psalms, which I don't think is unusual among thoughtful Christians. They plead for God to torture enemies, they lament our unjust sufferings; all of which seems wrong through the prism of Christ's teaching. But I think it suggests that I ought to find a way to adjust my thinking rather than to somehow find clever contextualizations that bring it into alignment with how I think it ought to be.
I'm planning on trying to actively read through them with a mind for how I can genuinely pray them. I have a copy of C.S. Lewis' Reflections on the Psalms which I've never read past the introduction, but which might be a useful guide.
Fun at Spirit Halloween.
On June 26th, 1777, an officer of the Continental Line, Captain Ephraim Anderson, was killed in the Battle of Short Hills. Three days later, Colonel Israel Sheve wrote in his journal "Col. Rhea Returned with the Body of Capt. Anderson is now Gone to Westfield to Bury him with the honours of war which he Deserves as he fought Brave, and fell in a Glorious Cause." Two hundred and forty-one years later, as a living relative, I got elected to his seat in the Society of the Cincinnati, which a healthy percentage of the people I know are aware of, since I tend to talk about it a lot...
Every October, the Society meets in Washington for a series of meetings and dinners.
One of the memorable highlights of this past weekend was the election of a new representative of Captain Jonathan Phillips by General David Petraeus. As the registrar, I had the honor of introducing him at the formal dinner, and got to visit a bit, (his ancestor, coincidentally, was the executor of the will of mine, the both of them having served in the same regiment), but had more time to speak with his wife since we were seated next to each other at a dinner.
Whenever I get the chance to talk to a notable public figure, I always enjoy asking about the experience. When I asked her to pinpoint when he became known, she mentioned Tom Brokaw referring to a successful "young general" in Mosul in 2003. I said sort of blithely that I find it appealing to have people always wanting to tell you how great you are. She mentioned the security issues, how he had been the only person in Bin Laden's recovered hard drive as a target.
I'd like to apologize to Sam Rockwell. You are an actor I have a lot of respect for, and in passing you on 12th Street this evening, you deserved better than to have "Pete & Pete!" shouted in your face, regardless of my fondness for your turn as Endless Mike on that show.
In other news, today I learned that Endless Mike was portrayed by an actor named Rick Gomez, and Sam Rockwell did not, in fact, ever appear on the show.
I practically never sit in the car to wait out the street-cleaning-no-parking period, but I happened upon the closest possible spot to my apartment coming home Sunday night, and with street cleaning suspended for Rosh Hashanah Thursday and Friday, I won't have to move until next Monday night!
Weekend fragments: duck bacon, billiards, pastry.
Highlight of the weekend was a post-church garden social. Proud of Sammy for hopping into a pick-up soccer match with the choir boys. Disappointed in my head seeming disproportionately massive in an otherwise nice photo...
A stressful fourteen-hour workday, but grateful for a challenging job. And for the ability to run across the street for a great lunch at Le Fournil.
Glad to have finally visited the Russian & Turkish Baths tonight. I've walked past a million times over many years, and never without thinking what a glorious old relic it seems to be and how I ought to visit.
Funny enough, when I walked up the steps tonight, a cheery old Russian sitting on the stoop greeted me playfully: "You're finally here!"
Walking in, the proprietor was incredibly friendly and welcoming as I said it was my first visit. He took my wallet and watch and put them in a lockbox to which he gave me the key. Along with the key, on a broad rubber bracelet, was a larger key to a locker in the changing room, and a medallion with the number 13: the number of both lockbox and locker, and to which I would charge any services.
On the ground floor is a small restaurant. I got a salmon and mashed potatoes that were quite good, along with a pot of oolong green tea and a Perrier. After, I went back to the counter to order a slice of cake. Also quite good, and all of it very reasonable. Less than $50, including a tip.
Then, changed into my swimsuit and tried the steam sauna, then the dry sauna, both of which were more comfortable than I'd worried they would be; and I stayed happily in each for quite awhile. Then I hopped into the cold plunge pool which lived up to its name and I only managed for about ten seconds. Then a visit to the hottest sauna, "The Russian Room". There is a small well in the center with a bucket floating over the surface of the cold water. Along the benches as well are a number of faucets streaming cold water into other buckets.
People will grab a bucket and dump the water over their head.
Wrapped up the evening on the upstairs veranda where a pair of old Russians had a spread of fruit and crackers on a picnic table. They offered me a slice of pineapple. I turned it down, politely, and nursed another Perrier from the restaurant.
All in all, the place exceeded my expectations. I think I'll make it a weekly ritual.
Day 3 of a routine centered around waking up at 5:50 and going for a run. The first day where I didn't wake up exhausted, having got to bed at a decent time; woke up before the alarm, in fact.
But still wondered what the point of it was.
I've also had a ritual of a morning shot of apple cider vinegar mixed with turmeric and cayenne and ginger syrup. Why? They're supposed to be beneficial. They upset my stomach.
Why do anything? My genuine desire in the mornings is to lie in bed and play Two Dots until my morning meeting, then work until the day ends, then lie back down. Sure, it feels like a waste of a day, but do a couple of pre-dawn laps around Tompkins Square Park magically elevate it? What is comfort worth?
That's why it's called a Honda Fit. ๐
I knew a girl at Cambridge who was half-English and half-German and spoke both languages natively. In discussing useful German words that had been adopted into English (like my oft-used schadenfreude) she lamented that we had not taken in schweinehund which translates literally to pig-dog and refers to one's inner voice that always counsels laziness.
I tend to think I have an especially prolific one.
Working from home with a bed and a window air-conditioning unit mere inches from my workspace does little to muzzle the schweinehund.
I don't think I'm unusual in that; but I do think it probably causes me a bit more agita than the average person and ultimately makes me feel a lack of agency in my own life, which has historically been the underlying issue in any of my life crises. Because it puts my present constantly at odds with my desired future. Obviously my past-self never aspires to spend hours on my bed playing a game on my phone or watching Instagram reels. Just like my present-self never sees any appeal to getting up early or running laps around Tompkins Square Park.
All of which is to preface that yesterday I decided today would finally be the day where I force myself back into a routine of more intentional days. As much as I (or the schweinehund) try to talk myself out of early morning exercise, the inherent value of the thing itself is secondary to the initial, immediate conquest of getting out of bed much too early and doing something miserable.
I aspired to six laps around Tompkins Square Park (having calculated that each one is roughly 0.55 miles, so six would be something like a 5k), but settled for two today (with a third walked in-between) since I've gotten even more out of shape than I was the last time I settled into this sort of routine.
There wasn't any sort of euphoria in it. Nor in the breakfast afterwards, nor the Bible reading nor DuoLingo rounds, nor the shower, nor the New Yorker readings over coffee. Mostly there's just a low-level tiredness. But if there's a point to any of this, it's that the pleasure of the present-self doesn't amount to much. It isn't lasting. I know that last night's self that worried whether I would have the wherewithal to get up with the alarm would be happy. And I imagine that tonight's self, feeling deserving of the bed he crawls--exhausted--into, will be as well.
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When I initially pulled in and stepped out to survey whether I thought I could pull it off, a passerby hollered: "You got this, King!"