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Murphy and Steinfels

the breakfast table
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from: Cullen Murphy

Sepulchral Chic

Posted Tuesday, Feb. 16, 1999, at 3:58 PM ET

The Cyprus File strategem is brilliant, and I am ready to adopt it. Question: Is it important to divide the file into Greek- and Turkish-controlled regions? Also, have you made a sub-directory yet for Hillary Clinton's presumptive Senate race? Or will that simply become a sub-sub-directory in the Giuliani insult file?

Your point about the post-scandal shape of the news invites obvious parallels with the Cold War. For a long time, a governing template brought a grim but reassuring orderliness to international affairs. Suddenly it was gone, and all hell broke loose. You and I enjoy some measure of journalistic insulation, provided by the long lead times of a biweekly (in your case) or monthly (in my case) publication schedule: there's a certain kind of ongoing news event that we can ponder as spectators but have no capacity to cover or comment on. I don't think The Atlantic has even used the letters O and J contiguously, except in a reference some years ago to the Native American tribe the Ojibway.

Back to the matter of Lent. As I ponder my own stance toward this season, it's worth noting that many Catholics have tended to take a tax attorney's approach: that is, they pay less attention to loading themselves up with more obligations than to discovering new loopholes in the obligations they're already under contract for. As you may remember from the intense theological discussions that sometimes occurred during grade-school recess, Sunday was totally exempt from any "giving-up" vow. Thus, if you had given up television, you could still watch The Wonderful World of Disney. Of course, starting in the late 1960s, when attending a Saturday afternoon Mass was decreed to be the legal equivalent of attending Sunday Mass, the issue of arose of whether the Lenten "Sunday" now began on Saturday.

The most astonishing loophole is the one involving the nutria-like creature called the capybara, also known as the water hog, a furry rodent indigenous to Venezuela. The capybara has been endowed with webbed feet, a characteristic that prompted Church officials in 16th century Venezuela to argue that it should be classified as a fish for the purposes of adhering to a meatless diet on Fridays. Fridays are still supposed to be meatless during Lent, but Venezuelans to this day are permitted to eat capybara. The heavens have truly smiled on some peoples.

Can I direct your attention this morning to Alessandra Stanley's "Arts" piece in the Times about the movie reviews on the Web site maintained by the Italian Bishops Conference? (Click here for the site.) I like the fact that, in addition to the unsurprising categories "acceptable" and "unacceptable", the Italian bishops also have the category "fatuous," which ought to be added to America's inadequate secular rating system. Another item that deserves a look is the mandatory, as-long-as-we're-here-for-Mardi-Gras-we-might-as-well-look-around feature story about New Orleans. This one has to do with "sepulchral chic": stealing ornamentation from those lugubriously baroque New Orleans graveyards for garden or salon display. Obviously this is a horrific practice. But I've always wondered where the dividing line lies when it comes to funerary objects--at what point do concerns about personal violation give way to legitimate celebration of human artistic heritage? All those sarcophagi in the Metropolitan are presumably OK. King Tut's tombware is presumably OK. But great-aunt Mabel's stone....

Don't let me forget: Prince Valiant. And Hans Kung, who's speaking tonight at Harvard.

the breakfast table
entries
1234567891011121314151617
from: Cullen Murphy

Sepulchral Chic

Posted Tuesday, Feb. 16, 1999, at 3:58 PM ET
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Cullen Murphy is the managing editor of the Atlantic Monthly and the author of the comic strip Prince Valiant. His book The Word According to Eve: Women and the Bible in Ancient Times and Our Own was published last fall. Margaret O'Brien Steinfels is the editor of Commonweal, an independent biweekly journal of political, religious, and literary opinion.
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