Mundane blogs

So there's a little note at the top of the blogger dashboard that I hadn't noticed before, and when I just glanced at it before hitting "new post" I thought it said Mundane blogs. My reaction was basically: "hey, I know it is, but do you have to rub it in?" Then I looked carefully and realized it says "Manage blogs." Ahem.

I just had to type in this passage from the book I'm reading (The Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies, at pp. 166-67). It's so, so, so perfect. Background: the protagonist, a Canadian schoolmaster, and a Jesuit priest are taking a train trip.

It was with this learned chatterbox that I set out to travel from Brussels to Vienna. I was early at the station, as he had commanded, and found him already in sole possession of a carriage. He beckoned me inside and went on with his task, which was to read aloud from breviary, keeping the window open the while, so that passersby would hear him.

“Give me a hand with a Paternoster,” he said and began to roar the Lord's Prayer in Latin as loud as he could. I joined in, equally loud, and we followed with a few rousing Aves and Agnus Deis. By dint of this pious uproar we kept the carriage for ourselves. People would come to the door, decide that they could not stand such company, and pass on, muttering.”

This should remind one reader of this blog of a flight back from Buenos Aires, and I think a few others have heard the story. It involves bare feet, which surely should pique the interest of some of my readers. Feel free to ask, but it's not getting posted publicly to the blog. A guy's gotta have a few secrets from the informationsuperinfobah, right?

I'm laughing out loud while reading this, with Nirvana's Unplugged in New York playing in the headphones, which provides a bizarre contrast. The music is about as raw, as throaty, as gut-wrenching as anything I've heard since Johnny Cash started putting out the American Recordings series late in his career. (And I also just heard an early cut of The Man Comes Around, a song which, despite its blatant proselytizing, I have always loved: it's amazingly raw, like a lot of stuff from those albums. The earlier cut wasn't as good.) The renditions of Come as You Are and All Apologies are amazingly intense, and give a whole new feel to those songs, and a cover of Lead Belly's arrangement of Where Did You Sleep Last Night is freaky it's so intense.

Where the hell was I when this album came out in 1997? Beats me.