I never read the seagull thing, my sister told me about it tho, she was shaken.

Heh, Heller and Thompson are pretty good if you’re manic by choice or disposition.

In my Art History (II) class when we did that sculpture, the lovely Dr Gregory had the slide up of the side view that you see from the floor, and was explaining what was going on and everything, then whipped to a detail of her face and quipped “We’ve all seen that expression before, or I hope so” and everyone laughed uproariously. Admittedly, it was a bit of a Bob Hope line (all about the delivery) so you’ll have to take my word for it that it was really quite funny.

There was an In Our Times podcast on Heaven at the beginning of last year, and they kept slipping into historical views of Hell, Dante especially, but others as well. Full of demons and torture. And the poor host kept trying to drag them back to heaven and they kept quoting various poets and authors (Red probably knows the ones) that thought heaven sounded rather boring since all you did was stand around singing, and somebody pointed out that obviously the problem was that people just couldn’t envision perpetual ecstasy. So as for St Theresa and the naughty references, I think they’re rather necessary.

And then there’s the small fact that most commissioned art up to the present modern art-for-tax-dollars was about stuffy old men hanging porn in their living rooms and telling their friends “Oh it’s art, isn’t it. Hey hey!”

There’ll be a book of the series of course. Wonder whether it’s worth badgering his publishers to include an erratum slip? That would be fun.

I was thinking of you at the weekend, RC2. My tutor in my first year at Cambridge was a chap called Simon Schama, who’s now rather well-known for his telly programmes (which to people who know about the history weren’t quite as impressive as he thought them). His latest series is about great works of art.

The programme last Friday evening was about Bernini’s statue of the Ecstasy of St Theresa of Avila in S. Maria della Vittoria in Rome. (Incidentally, one wonders the victory in question was. I suppose just the one between the Goths and Garibaldi can’t be counted excessive.) The sculpture is of course absolutely wonderful both technically as a piece of carving and emotionally as a portrayal of what happens when we have a more developed capacity to contemplate the magnitude of God’s love for us.

Not good enough for our Simon, I’m afraid. With his customary sneering and mugging, he came over all excited at the thought of what the stuffy old men who ran the Church in Bernini’s day must have made of a sculpture, the erotic component of which was central and unmistakable. “Golly!” he observed in so many words, “this’ll have got them all worked up!”.

At which point one wanted to tell the 59 year-old Schama it’s time to grow up. Or, failing that, direct him to the very substantial body of Catholic thought into the role and nature of both and Eros and Agape in God’s love for his Church and mankind. Given that these telly-types resent time wasted reading, perhaps the best brief meditation on the subject was by B16 earlier this year, as glossed and amplified so very usefully by RC2. Had he had chance to read that, one hopes he’d have come up with a more substantial an appreciation of the statue, or at least more than the sort of stuff one might expect from a 14 year-old with spots. The Church knows a damn sight more about the erotic - and its purposes - than does our Simon, a thought that doesn’t seem to have struck him.

You’d have thought that after 30-odd years he’d have lost some of his power of irritation: but he hasn’t. An achievement of some sort, I suppose.