Monthly Archives: November 2012

Odds and Manners

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I’d like to direct your attention to two blog posts by Sarah Hoyt. In the first, Sarah takes about being “an odd”, a person who never quite fits in, or at least never quite feels they fit in. On the way she talks about why it might be that men like Karl Marx created ideologies that idealized particular groups while being nasty to individual members of those groups. It’s an interesting hypothesis.

In the second, she talks about the importance of manners, and shares some intriguing memories. Her remembrance of the women who tried to teach her manners is an illustration of what happens when you forget the parenting maxim, “Never attribute to willfulness what can be adequately explained by ignorance.”

What, you’ve never heard that maxim before? Not surprisingly, as I just made it up—it’s a riff on the old line, “Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.” But it’s a maxim I’ve sometimes failed to heed, and as Sarah’s tale shows, that’s a Bad Thing.

I Left My Brains in San Francisco

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I Left My Brain in San Francisco In I Left My Brains in San Francisco, Karina Fabian’s new novel, zombie exterminator Neeta Lyffe is travelling to San Francisco’s Moscone Center for ZomZeitgeber, the international zombie exterminator’s trade show. Yes, it’s a sequel to Neeta Lyffe, Zombie Exterminator, which somehow I unaccountably failed to review when I read it last year. This is frustrating, because I was all set to point at my old review and say “As before, so now.” Alas!

OK, here’s the shtick. In Neeta Lyffe’s world, zombies are a fact of life. Anyone who dies and is buried without a whole spine is at risk of coming back as a zombie; and anyone bitten by a zombie is likely to die and come back PDQ. In general folks have learned to live with this, calling in a professional zombie exterminator when they get out of hand. And zombie exterminators, needless to say, rely on a variety of weaponry up to and including hazmat suits and spray bottles of cleaning supplies…because zombies really hate cleaning supplies.

Did I say that Fabian’s playing this for laughs? She is. Horror, too, but mostly laughs.

In Neeta Lyffe, Zombie Exterminator, Neeta is tapped to be the host of a new reality show, Zombie Death Extreme, in which she trains a bunch of novices to be real zombie exterminators. Thing is, some of the zombies are real, and death is a real possibility. The producer’s a jerk (if I recall correctly), and Neeta hates the whole thing—she’s only doing because one of her customers (another jerk) sued her for property damage after she saved him from being zombified, and she needs the money. But she and her crew sure come in handy when there’s a massive zombie outbreak in Burbank, California. (Right across the freeway from Ikea and the Media City Center mall…Fabian described the geography so well that I could take you to the exact spot.)

In the new book, Neeta’s off to the trade show with her boyfriend; and of course, the course of true love does not Run Smooth. Plus, there’s another zombie exterminator hitting on her, and the zombie outbreak from the offshore eco-freak reef burial site. (Turns out that environmentalist zombies moan “Green!” as they attack you.)

I found this one to be more uneven than its predecessor; the romance subplot was occasionally tedious, and since the plot involves a new Government Motors vehicle that runs on fuel produced from human waste, the potty humor gets a little, um, ripe. But I enjoyed it; it’s a good, light read, and made me laugh. If Fabian produces another Neeta Lyffe book, I plan to buy it.

A Bunch o’ Links

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Today was a good day around the blogosphere; so here are some links for you.

Ed Feser on the four cardinal virtues and their modern counterfeits.

Mike Flynn on Aquinas’ “Fourth Way” of proving the existence of God, and why Richard Dawkins doesn’t get it. Mike writes very clearly about complicated stuff.

Tom McDonald on St. Augustine’s medicine for doubt, which one might subtitle “Learn from the mistakes of others.” I need to spend more time with St. Augustine.

On Beyond Mazes

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So you’ve got some code to produce mazes; what do you do next?

The obvious answer is to make use of it put some kind of game together. Trouble is, that means learning to use Java’s GUI toolkit to put together a real GUI application. Now, I’ve done a fair amount of GUI programming over the years, so the basic concepts are familiar, and I’ve even done some Java GUIs in the distant past. And there’s a detailed Java GUI tutorial available on the Java website. Easy, right?

Wrong…because games usually have much different user interaction models than your typical GUI application. Instead of relying on high-level components like buttons and menus, you have to “paint” most of the GUI yourself, which means using the low-level drawing primitives. But that’s no problem, because there’s a tutorial for the Java 2D Graphics library. Easy, right?

Still wrong, because there’s a gap between the two tutorials. The one tells you how to assemble components into a GUI, and the other tells you how to draw; what’s needed is how to build new components that can draw game sprites and such-like.

But Google is your friend; and I found a very nice Java 2D Games Tutorial that’s exactly what I need. At the end of the first four lessons I’ve got a simple “Defender” style game, in which you can move a spaceship up and down and shoot missiles at the alien ships coming in from the right. It works nicely, and covers a lot of the skills I’d need to do something fun with moving around in a maze. The same website has its own tutorials for the Java Swing GUI toolkit and Java 2D Graphics, though I’ve not looked at those yet.

Creating Animated GIFs

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Getting back to maze creation, I thought it might be interesting to create animations of the maze growing algorithms, as an aid to debugging and just for general coolness. The easiest way to do that is to save an animated GIF file, because those can be viewed in any web browser without any added software. The only problem is that I didn’t know how to do it. Google is your friend, however, and I found an example of how to create an animated GIF on the Java Forums.

The example has a problem. It animates a GIF of four frames by pulling in four images from the web, and it so happens that the links to those images are now dead. Consequently, you end up with a run-time error. Not to worry; I massaged the code so that it creates a number of small images in memory an animates those. Here’s my proof of concept:

Animatedtiles

Not fancy, but it works nicely.

The Crimes of Galahad

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The Crimes of Galahad The inimitable Dr. Boli has written his first novel, The Crimes of Galahad, the scandalous tale of one Galahad Newman Bousted, the self-proclaimed “wickedest man in the world.” Under the influence of a review of a book by the wicked French author the Conte de Baucher, he rejects the mawkish sentiments and morality of his shopkeeper father and determines to lead a life of evil: to wit, to concern himself not at all with morality but only with his own self-interest, rationally understood.

I don’t want to give the game away; if you’re familiar with Dr. Boli, you’ll know that things probably aren’t entirely what they seem, and that the Good Doctor has Views on where true rational self-interest will lead. The book is both funny and surprising, and I enjoyed watching how it played out. Here are a few quotes from the text:

To persist in evil requires dedica­tion and perseverance. At every step, the temptations to do good are numerous, and at times nearly over­whelming.

The truly evil man, which is to say the enlightened man, does not prize continence for its own sake; but any virtue may be a tool in the pursuit of that which he desires. This is an important principle that every aspiring evildoer ought to take to heart: the truly evil man does not hesitate to practice virtue when doing so conduces to his advantage.

I do not recall a single novel in which the action was confined to repeated sales of identical commercial goods.

Money can buy the satisfaction of almost any lust, whereas lust almost invariably eats up money. To the young man pursuing a life of wickedness, I have this advice to give: always put greed before lust when indulging your petty sins.

Nothing so effectually robs a man of his wickedness as this insidious passion: though lust be accounted a sin, it too often proves a cunning trap that pulls a man inexorably downward, away from his true self-interest, and toward that disinterested sort of love that desires the good of its object. The wickedest man in the world, giving in to his lust, may find himself positively virtuous before he knows it.

What a strange thing it is that a man who, in the eyes of all society, would be condemned as a vicious criminal if he ravished an unmarried woman, can be, by a few words spoken in a church, made into a paragon of virtue, with the uncontested right to ravish the same woman whenever he pleases!

One final thought. Although the book made me laugh, it’s by no means a farce; in retrospect, it’s a serious meditation on the relationship between virtue, goodness, and grace, on the limitations of purely human virtue, and on human nature and the natural law. I suspect I’m going to be pondering it for some while.

The Can-Opener

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When I was in college, I got a degree in Economics, much to my lasting surprise. Here is the deepest, truest thing I learned about economics in four years of study—not the only thing, but the essential point, not to be forgotten.

Once an engineer, a physicist, and an economist were stranded on a desert island with only a cigarette lighter and a can of tuna fish. The engineer quickly gathered driftwood and built a fire, but the can of tuna fish presented a problem. They sat around the fire and discussed strategies for opening it as they got hungrier and hungrier.

The engineer said, “I know! There are some sharp rocks over there. I’ll go grab one, and bash at the can until it breaks open.”

The physicist said, “No, no, no, you’re working too hard. Just put the can in the fire. The heat will make the contents expand, and eventually the can will burst open.”

The economist just chuckled and shook his head, and said, “You’re both working too hard. First, you assume a can-opener!”

Those who might contest this can go look at Exhibit A, in which a finanical analyst discusses the problem of trusting financial models with shaky foundations.

Vocations to Third Orders

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So yesterday I talked about what it means to be a Lay Dominican. Among other things, I said that it’s a vocation, something you’re called to. But how do you know whether you’re called to it or not?

I’ve been pondering that today, and I’ve got a few thoughts to share; but I hasten to say first that I can only speak authoritatively about my own experience, which is limited. Your mileage may vary considerably.

First, I think a strong desire is probably a good sign. I wanted to be a Lay Dominican as soon as I learned that there was such a thing; and that’s a desire that hasn’t gone away. And then, when I returned to the Church (which was, oddly, somewhat later), I wanted to make an additional commitment of the sort you make when you join a Third Order. I didn’t simply presume that the Lay Dominicans were for me; instead, I did some research. It turns out that the Dominicans, the Franciscans, the Carmelites, the Benedictines, the Jesuits, the Augustinians (the who?) all have third orders. It seemed reasonable to look into them. I was not at all attracted to the Franciscans, which is perhaps odd, as we’ve got lots of Franciscans in the area. Carmelite contemplation is attractive, at least in theory, and there are also Carmelites in our area. Next to the Dominicans I liked what I learned about the Benedictines most. Their motto, “prayer and work”, makes sense to me. Benedictines are also all about stability, blooming where you’re planted, and that describes me pretty well, too. And St. Andrew’s Abbey is within driving distance, and they have lots of oblates in this area. If there hadn’t been any Lay Dominicans in this area I might have gone that route.

But there were, and of course I looked them up first…and just kind of got stuck. Once I linked up with them, there seemed no reason to look further; I wanted to be a Dominican, and on acquaintance they wanted me to be a Dominican, and here we are. Point is, if you feel called to a deeper relationship with Christ, and the Third Orders have some appeal, it might be worth checking out the different varieties and finding out what your options are in your area. But if you feel called to a particular order, check that out first.

It seems to me that strong desire as a sign of vocation is not uncommon; both St. Therese of Lisieux and St. Edith Stein both had a passionate desire to be Carmelites for a long time before they were able to persuade anyone to agree with them. But that least phrase is key: a strong desire isn’t enough. There are lots of women in the news these days who have a strong, overwhelming desire to be Catholic priests, but the Church has said that it simply isn’t possible. And certainly there have been men who have been ordained priests, who wanted to be priests, who should never have been ordained. Desire isn’t enough; and discernment isn’t one-sided. While you’re discerning whether or not you’re called to a Third Order, the order in question is discerning the same thing. That’s their job.

An essential thing in all of this is obedience. By joining a Third Order, you’re promising to live according to a rule. If you’re not willing to be obedient to the rule, and to those over you in the order as called for by the rule, then you might want to think again.

The Dominican Laity

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Recently, two different people have asked me about what it means to be a Lay Dominican, and what’s involved.

First, to be a Lay Dominican is to be a lay member of the Dominican order. We used to be called the Third Order, or the “tertiaries”; the First Order was the Friars, and the Second Order was the cloistered nuns and active sisters. But the terms First, Second, and Third order are discouraged these days, and we are all just Dominicans together. (Me, I kind of like the term Third Order, but I wasn’t asked).

Every order has its particular charism and focus, and the focus of the Dominican order is preaching for the salvation of souls; the order’s official name is the Order of Preachers. If you see someone write his name with an “OP” after it, you know he’s a Dominican. For us Lay Dominicans, it used to be OPL (Order of Preachers, Lay), and before that it was TOP (Tertiary, Order of Preachers), and now it’s just OP, because we are all just Dominicans together. Which means that if I use the OP after my name I have to say “Mr. Will Duquette, OP”, because otherwise the natural tendency would be to think that I was a friar, which (with a wife and four kids) I am manifestly not.

The Dominicans are a mendicant order, like the Franciscans, and I believe the friars do take a vow of poverty. But the vow of poverty isn’t part of the Dominican identity the way it is for the Franciscans. Dominicans are about four things, the Four Pillars:

Prayer. Everything we do has to be rooted and grounded in prayer. We pray the Liturgy of the Hours (Lauds, Vespers, and Compline) each day, and also the Rosary; and we are to attend mass daily if possible. (For me, it generally isn’t.) Additional private prayer is recommended.

Study. As Dominicans, we study. We study scripture; we study theology; we study the world around us. We study to know God better, and to know His creation better. Truth is what is, beginning with God; and the Dominican motto is Veritas, Truth. Study can flow naturally into and out of prayer; often the times I feel closest to God are when I’ve just been struck by some idea in the midst of study.

Preaching. As I indicated above, the mission of the order is preaching for the salvation of souls. Preaching can take many forms, and the most important thing is that it must be adapted to those to whom you’re preaching. Dominic adopted evangelical poverty because the Albigensians, those he most wanted to reach, were ascetics and much disgusted with the wealth and worldliness they saw in the secular clergy. Dominicans follow St. Paul, in being all things to all men in order to win some. For this reason, Dominic insisted that his rule be revisited over the course of time, so that it would be always fresh.

So different Dominicans preach in different ways. Me, I’m a blogger; and there are other things I do as well.

Community. Dominican friars, nuns, and sisters live in community. Lay Dominicans live in the world, in their own homes, but they come together in their chapter once a month, at least, to pray, study, and (usually) to eat together. You can’t be a Dominican on your own. Dominic sent his friars to the four corners of the world, but he sent them two-by-two. So we pray for each other, and support each other, and learn from each others.

Being a Dominican is a vocation. You have to be called to it, and you have to find a chapter that agrees that you’re called to it. Once you’re professed, you have to make your chapter a priority in your life, just as you do with your family. My chapter meeting is sacred; I’m a lector at mass, but I don’t read at mass on the mornings when my chapter meets.

Before I became a Lay Dominican, I had the romantic notion that the average Dominican chapter would be a group of budding St. Thomas Aquinases. ‘Tain’t so. Dominicans are people, and some are smarter than others, and some are holier than others, and some are sometimes just plain annoying. But as a chapter we have a shared task of growing in holiness together and helping each other along the way.

Lay Dominicans promise to live according to the Dominican Rule (a variant of the Augustinian Rule), and according to the “Particular Directory” of their province. Interesting, unlike other orders the Dominican Rule doesn’t bind on pain of sin: if you do not follow the rule on a particular day, it is not a sin. There are two reasons for this: first, Dominic wanted us to follow the Rule out of love, rather than out of fear of sin; and second, he wanted us to be flexible enough to put the salvation of souls before everything else. Even in the early days, friars were sometimes excused from saying the Divine Office so as to have more time for study; and if I were to be having a fruitful conversation with someone when it was time for Evening Prayer then by all means I should be free to continue it.

Of course, I do sometimes fail to live up to the Rule; and usually for no such good reason as Dominic envisioned. But each day is a new day, and as St. Jose Maria Escriva said, the interior life is beginning and beginning again. With prayer, and study, and (as best I can) preaching; and with community with my chapter. That’s how it all goes.