FASTING purifies the soul. It lifts up the mind, and it brings the body into subjection to the spirit. It makes the heart contrite and humble, scatters the clouds of desire, puts out the flames of lust and enkindles the true light of chastity. -- Augustine                                                               

  [NOTE: I originally posted a picture of Amy Bishop here, but I found it too disturbing, I decided to remove it. It is a chilling portrait of an angry human being.]   It is always more shocking when a woman commits an act of extreme violence. The case of Amy Bishop, the neuroscientist who allegedly shot three professors at the University of Alabama last week, is especially troubling. Bishop has a Ph.D. from Harvard and is the mother of four children. Her case raises disturbing questions about a life of ambition and violence. Bishop shot her 18-year-old brother in 1986 in Massachusetts and the death was ruled accidental. She also was previously questioned in a 1993 case involving a pipe bomb sent to a former colleague. Bishop was denied tenure and there is speculation this fueled her rage. She was described by the New York Times as "fiercely intelligent." According to the Boston Herald, Bishop held a gun to a man's chest at a Boston area auto body shop and demanded a getaway vehicle minutes after her brother's shooting 24 years ago. According to the Herald, Bishop's mother was a member of the police personnel board in Braintree at the time of the shooting.

  WOULD YOU, could you love a man who looks like this?  The New York Times describes the latest in men's fashions here. I realize the idea is to create a look that appeals to other men, not women.                        -- Comments -- Lisa writes: "Would I, could I, love a man who looks like this?" That's just it: there are no men who look like that.

MALE AND FEMALE are more than biological realities. They are spiritual essences and cultural ideals. Bonald, a writer who takes his pseudonym from the French  monarchist Louis de Bonald, describes these ideals at his site, Throne and Altar. He writes:

Of course, each nature has its characteristic deformations, but it is always a gross error to identify a thing with its deformation. (more…)

IN THE ANNALS OF surrogate mothering, British nannies and Southern nannies are the most famous, two utterly different species, now mostly extinct. In response to the recent posts on nannies near and far, a reader sends this beautiful excerpt from Stephen Vincent Benet’s John Brown’s Body about a black slavewoman, “matriarch of the weak and young:”

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  WE HAVE about three feet of snow in our yard here in Pennsylvania. That may seem unexceptional for residents of Buffalo or Syracuse but for us, it's very exceptional. During the blizzard on Wednesday, we lost power for ten hours and a gargantuan  pine fell across our road. At the height of the storm, these words from the Bellows Falls Times in Vermont seemed apt. They were written right after the Blizzard of 1888: "No paths, no streets, no sidewalks, no light, no roads, no guests, no calls, no teams, no hacks, no trains, no moon, no meat, no milk, no paper, no mail, no news, no thing -- but snow."

IN THE THIRD OF a series of essays on the decline in literacy, Thomas F. Bertonneau explores the connection between memory and popular culture. He describes introducing his university students to folk and music-hall songs. He says, “there is a startling difference between the songs that students consume and the songs that their grandparents and great grandparents sang, the memory of which the commercialization of music rudely interrupted, starting about fifty years ago”:  (more…)

It’s hard to overstate the importance of two French intellectuals, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, in the history of postmodern romance. Much has been written that discredits their image, but the fairy tale lives on.

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 IN RESPONSE TO the previous posts on nannies,  which can be found  here and here, a working nanny writes in to share her observations. By the way, Eloise, the famous character who roamed the halls of the Plaza Hotel, was able to have a perfectly decent life with her “rawther” British nanny, who never kept Eloise from her very necessary adventures.

Mrs. Cote writes:

As someone who is currently a professional nanny, I just wanted to thank you for pointing out that there are those of us who take our work seriously. You are right to point the low paid, usually foreign women are not actually nannies. At best they can be called babysitters. They should be called dangerous since they are completely unsupervised and are actually allowed to take their charges out of the home. A true governess would work with school age children while a nanny/nurse would care for babies and very young children.

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