Fungible Convictions

I know, I know. This is a literary website, so what’s with all the church stuff? But anyone who’s Orthodox knows that for Holy Week, your life as you know it stops, and it’s all you can do to keep from making everything about your church community (which is kind of the point for us).

Now that Holy Week is over, I’ll try to get posts back to being about literature and design matters. (For example, don’t forget that the Newburyport Literary Festival is less than a week away! Andre Debus III, Steve Almond, Margaret Love-Denman, Pam Painter, Verilyn Klinkenborg, and many other distinguished guests will be in attendance, and unless you’re an idiot like me and scheduled your vacation at the same time as the festival, you’re constitutionally obligated to go.) Nevertheless, there remain a handful of wonderful Holy Week memories I want to spread around, starting with last night’s services and feast at St. Mary’s.

First, you gotta understand: we Orthodox just spent six weeks fasting (being vegan essentially) and spent the last week in church an average of two hours a night. Last night, the culmination of Holy Week—Pascha, or Easter—we were in services starting at 10pm, on through to about 1:15am. We sing, chant, cross ourselves like it’s going out of style, process out of the church to bang on “princes’ gates” to announce the Resurrection—in other words, we’re physically and mentally exhausted, but also feeling joyous. So what better way to break fast and celebrate than with a feast that goes for a few more hours!

Orthodox feast by drinking, eating, eating, drinking, and being incredibly silly. (We’re batty by the end of Holy Week; last night the choir repeated a particular hymn, and almost no one noticed; Fr. Anthony blew a prayer at one point and got the giggles at the altar.) Best-friend-from-church Bill brought a bottle of fifteen year old Laphroaig. We laughed our butts off at our friend Will, who called it “laff-rogg,” and gave him credit for inventing the name of a new Muppet.

Chris and Abra, who also made a batch of rum-and-whisky tiramisu, brought some Dogfish Head IPA, one of the top brews of the mid-Atlantic states. I should admit at this point that I’m a complete freeloader; I can’t cook, and I had no time to buy anything for the feast. So when I said, “Boy, I’d really love one of Chris’ Dogfishes,” Bill took a long drink of his and said, “Whelp, shoulda brought your own.”

Wine and vodka is in abundance, lots of uzo and arak, and you can usually find one of the deacons asking for people to take shots of his infused vodka with him. Oh, but then there’s the food!

Ham, lamb, meatballs, Chinese food, brie, pate (apparently?), kielbasa, cakes, pastries, cookies, brownies, baklava, and anything else, all homemade, that we can drown in to forget the deprivations of the fast. Oh, but then, off to the side at its own table, is the Eritrean food—if it’s possible to say that the Devil maintained any foothold during a Paschal party, it’s with Eritrean food. On one hand, the smell of the Eritreans’ food is so glorious that to describe it I’d have to use profanity. On the other hand, this is what you say as you eat your first bite: “Mmmmmm, oh man this is good. This is so good! I can’t get over how—hm, getting warm. Oh jeez it’s got a kick, huh? Wow, this is really hot. Very hot. Hot! Hot! Son of a . . . ! Make it stop, IT’S MELTING MY FACE OFF!!!”

Evil, evil I say!

By 3am, the silliness had really taken over. Bill and I were quoting lines from Airplane! (“Cigarette?” “Yes, I know.”)(“Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit amphetamines.”) At one point I was laughing with my head on our table. Fr. Anthony made a quick speech to thank a parishioner for her work getting the feast ready, and someone said, “Don’t forget the Eritreans!”

“The Eritreans! Yeah!” Father said, sounding like a frat guy giving a shout-out to an upperclassman. Wooo! Eritrea!

Then a few minutes later, the man who taught my catecumen class silenced half the hall by finishing a story with the yelled line, “And she said, ‘Nuh-uh! You just bitch-slapped her!’”

I love Pascha! Christ is risen! Truly he is risen!
________

More St. Mary’s Holy Week links:

St. Mary Orthodox Church website
Photos from Great and Holy Pascha
Audio from Holy Tuesday’s Bridegroom Matins
Video of Good Friday procession down Massachusetts Ave.
Video of Vesperal Liturgy
My Holy Week photoset on Flickr
Buy a CD by St. Mary’s Boston Byzantine Choir, or listen to a sample.

Tin House: “This Girl Needs a Spanking”, a reflection on The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer—yes, the Twin Peaks Laura Palmer.

A literary festival in Newburyport, Mass., has been announced. Set aside April 28 and 29 for what will be a cathartic couple of days—the Boston area has long been ripe for a literary festival, but no one had put one together until now.

One of the attendees for the Newburyport Literary Festival is friend and poet Bill Coyle, who just won The New Criterion Poetry Prize. Congratulations, Bill. His manuscript The God of This World to His Prophet will be published this fall.

I just discovered The Institute for the Future of the Book. Should be a good fellow traveler.

The full research paper on the Sony DRM debacle was published. It deserves time to be digested but will certainly be a key reference for the digital rights debate in the coming months.

Yahoo has created a developer network, giving anyone quick access to code Yahoo employs every day. This will be unbelievably valuable to green-horned and experienced developers alike.

BoingBoing continues to argue that Google Book Search is good for publishers. I continue to agree. A quote:

[Publishers] argue that GBS should pay some money to publishers because anyone who makes money off a book should kick some back — but no one comes after carpenters for a slice of bookshelf revenue. Ford doesn’t get money from Nokia every time they sell a cigarette-lighter phone-charger. The mere fact of making money isn’t enough to warrant owing something to the company that made the product you’re improving.

Rick Moody in A Public Space: “But one can’t excuse inflating three hours in jail into 87 days in jail. Such license is too much. When I wrote my own memoir, I worked my ass off to make sure that everything I included was true to the best of my knowledge.”

How to write good e-mails. While some of the tips are now well known bits of e-mail etiquette—like avoiding all caps—tips like #8 (Don’t Fabricate Unanswerable Questions) are new, valuable, and right-on.

AGNI: The Waterwheel. AGNI again publishes a great piece of translated, near-forgotten poetry.

N+1: Review of Bernard Herni-Levi’s do-over of Tocqueville’s travels. It’s not a positive review of American Vertigo, and, in fact, I haven’t seen a positive review of it yet. If indeed it’s so bad, my guess is because a Frenchman nowadays doesn’t have an interesting perspective for looking at America, not like Tocqueville did. To replicate his trip, you’d need to send an aristocratic American to travel India or China. Can we resurrect George Plimpton already?

Ploughshares, “The Heiress from Horn Lake” by Katherine Taylor: “I have never, but for that first night with Vivienne, vomited in the back of a taxi.”