Gathering Goat Eggs

How on earth can everyone in the United States be so crabby right now? John Roberts this, Karl Rove that, if you turn down the volume a little and just listen to the ebb and flow of grumbling, it sounds like a batallion of irritable old women griping about their husbands' hairy ears. Stop it, America: the blackberries are ripe. Everyone should have a little farm with blackberries in the hedgerows; then they could fill their bellies and quit their bellyaching.

Herewith:

Mrs. Goat Eggs' Blackberry Cobbler

Filling:

4 pints blackberries, freshly gathered by the entire family, preferably at dusk so you can see the first fireflies come out just as you're finishing up.
3/4 to to 1 cups white sugar, to taste
Our blackberries are wild relics of the 19th century which have probably been growing here untended since before the Civil War, and are considerably tarter than modern cultivars, so I use 1 cup of sugar. On the other hand, they have an incredibly complex flavor that I do not detect in purchased blackberries, even those at the Amish roadstands.
2 tablespoons cornstarch
2 tablespoons lemon juice

Biscuit topping:

Dry ingredients

10 oz. unbleached white flour; or about 2 cups, but it's really better to measure flour by weight than volume.
1/2 cup white sugar
1/4 cup yellow cornmeal
4 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt

Mix together all dry ingredients in a large bowl.

Wet ingredients

8 tablespoons unsalted butter (1 stick), melted
2/3 cup buttermilk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Mix together wet ingredients in a small bowl.

I don't usually have buttermilk on hand, but I always have a cannister of buttermilk powder. The powder works just fine in this recipe, and in that case you can mix the powder with the dry ingredients and add 2/3 cup water to the melted butter.

cinnamon sugar:

1 tablespoon white sugar
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Mix and set aside.

Place all filling ingredients in a 13 x 9 inch baking pan and mix gently. Bake at 375 deg. F for approximately 25 minutes, until filling is hot and bubbling at the edges.

One minute before the filling is done, add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients, folding in with a spatula just until uniformly moist and there are no air pockets.

Take the hot filling from the oven, and increase the temperature to 425 deg. F. Pinch off uniform pieces of dough and place on top of filling, with about 1/2 inch space in between. Five rows of three biscuits works pretty well. Sprinkle each mound of dough with cinnamon sugar. Return to oven for 15 to 20 minutes, until biscuits are browned and crisp-looking. Cool for at least 30 minutes. If you are extra-crabby, serve warm with vanilla ice cream.

This recipe can be halved and prepared in an 8 by 8 baking pan, but why on earth would you want to do that?

Elsewhere I spent some time last week defending Harry Potter against the charge that he is incompatible with Christianity. I have now finished the latest installment in the Potter saga, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and I now think that I was not only right, I understated the case. J.K. Rowling's vision is not just reconcilable with orthodox Christian thought, it uses elements of Christian theology as a moral underpinning and as an explanation of why the world is as it is.

Now, I'm not claiming that Harry Potter's world is an integrated and purposely-thought-out Christian allegory, like Narnia. Neither is it a coherent mythical world whose author is so steeped in Christianity that everything is viewed through this lens, like the worlds Tolkien invented. But neither is Hogwarts a secular adventure, where evil is defined as material harm to others. Voldemort is evil not just because he has caused mayhem, or killed people. He is evil because he has deliberately torn asunder something within himself that was created to stay whole.

This revelation of what, in the wizarding world, constitutes the ultimate -- yes, I will say sin, although Rowling does not use the word -- comes while Dumbledore and Harry are pursuing information about Voldemort's past through means of the Pensieve. This device, to which we were introduced in Prisoner of Azkaban (and which is, by the way, a tempting object for any wife whose husband insists on contradicting her based on his own obviously faulty recollections) enables third parties to enter a virtual reality of another's memories. Dumbledore has gone to great effort to obtain memories of those who surrounded Tom Riddle, the future Voldemort, in his youth, in an attempt to identify his weaknesses and so defeat him. A breakthrough comes when they obtain an honest memory from the new Potions master, Horace Slughorn, a elderly man who taught Dark Arts at Hogwarts when Riddle was a student, and who previously provided what was obviously an altered memory.

Riddle has stayed behind after a gathering to question Slughorn alone. He wants to know about the making and use of a Horcrux, an object in which a person has concealed part of their soul:

I don't quite understand how that works, though, sir," said Riddle. His voice was carefully controlled, but Harry could sense his excitement.

"Well, you split your soul, you see," said Slughorn, "and hide part of it in an object outside the body. Then, even if one's body is attacked or destroyed, one cannot die, for part of the soul remains earthbound and undamaged. But of course, existence in such a form....few would want it, Tom, very few. Death would be preferable."

But Riddle's hunger was now apparent; his expression was greedy, he could no longer hide his longing. "How do you split your soul?"

"Well," said Slughorn uncomfortably, "you must understand that the soul is supposed to remain intact and whole. Splitting it is an act of violation. It is against nature."

An act of violation. Against nature. I'm not sure you get much closer to an orthodox account of The Fall without actually quoting from the Philokalia. The language, and the idea, is right out of the Eastern Fathers of the Church. But there's more.

"But how do you do it?"

"By an act of evil -- the supreme act of evil. By committing murder. Killing rips the soul apart. The wizard intent upon creating a Horcrux would use the damage to his advantage: He would encase the torn portion --"

"Encase? But how--?"

"There is a spell, do not ask me, I don't know!" said Slughorn, shaking his head like an old elephant bothered by mosquitoes. "Do I look was though I have tried it -- do I look like a killer?"

Of course, later, the epicurian, comfort-loving Slughorn realizes that through his own careless attitude -- even telling Riddle that it's natural to feel some curiosity about these things....Wizards of a certain caliber have always been drawn to that aspect of magic.... -- he has contributed to the ascent of horrific evil in his world. His response? Instead of doing what he can to rectify his error, to assist those who are braver and more energetic than he, he succumbs to fear and shame and attempts to hide what he has done. The circumstances under which he relents lead me to another conclusion: in certain circumstances, magic in Harry Potter is a symbol of grace. But I think I'll leave that one for another post.

Was it Get Your Lazy Butt Off the Couch and Weed the Garden Sunday? I got the point after the first reading and the psalm, the Gospel was just laying it on a bit thick. I will pull up all those pokeberry plants and spread the Milorganite tomorrow. Promise.

With all the hoo-hah of the last couple of days, I didn't post anything about our amazing Independence Day excursion. We picked up picnic food at Balducci's in Alexandria and drove north on the George Washington Parkway until we found a place to pull over at the side of the road. This was just north of the little park on the Virginia side of the Potomac by Roosevelt Island. We packed our lawn chairs and food south until we could see around the tip of the island, and camped out right on the water's edge. If you drew a straight line through the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial and extended it across the Potomac, that's exactly where we were sitting. We loafed and ate and Anne made some friends who cooperated in flinging stones into the water while we old geezers read our books. And then the sun set and they started igniting the fireworks and it looked like this.

Happy Belated Birthday, America! Lots of earth-shattering kabooms. Several airplanes flew south right over our heads on the river approach to Reagan Airport. I wonder what on earth it's like to fly right through a fireworks display? I'm not a nervous flier, but it might have unnerved me a bit.

There is, understandably, a great deal of fervent pro-British sentiment in the blogosphere today, typified by Ed Morrisey's clarion that today We Are All Britons. This is a stirring sentiment, yet I cannot wholeheartedly endorse it. Mostly because I saw what happened in the days following the declaration of the world that they were all Americans now. Many said it for reasons that should not gladden an American heart. They said it because we'd just been kicked in the teeth. They said it because we were bleeding. Once it became clear, to ourselves and to the world, that the Clinton days of lobbing a couple of cruise missiles at a sand dune and convening a grand jury were over, that we were going to kick in some teeth ourselves, the Old Glorgasms faded pretty quickly in a lot of places.

Not Great Britain, though. The Australians, the Poles, the Czechs, the Hungarians.... may we all continue to stand together with Great Britain, the latest to have her nose bloodied, but surely not the last. Today, we are all Men of the West.

By all that we hold dear on this earth I bid you stand, men of the West!
How my heart leapt when Aragorn delivered that line. Yes, yes, Viggo Mortensen is a vapid lefty 'tard. It matters no more than Ingrid Bergman's extramarital escapades invalidate one of the greatest nun portrayals on film.

I love the way the Brits have responded; the sappy Live and Let Di public mourning has been swept aside as a nation dives into the pubs, goes back into the Tube and flips the Islamofascists a hearty "Sod Off." Greg Gutfeld reports from London:

Bombs go off around the corner and the Brits do what they do best - they go to the pub and get drunk and make the best of it. [Warning: if you have a low tolerance for Queer Eye Camp, do not follow the link.]

My husband's alarm clock radio is the conduit for bad news in our house. The morning of 9/11/2001 I'd been up for a couple of hours, doing the morning prep routine in our quiet Minneapolis house. I'm not the type who has a TV in the kitchen or dining room, and I'd heard nothing that morning but a couple of ambulances going to the hospital just up the street. I had just seen the girls off to the bus stop when John barrelled down the stairs, practically knocking me ass over teakettle, in his haste to get to the basement, the TV, and some clarification of the horrific accident in New York he'd just heard reported on NPR. It wasn't an accident, of course. We got to the TV in time to see the second plane hit.

This morning I was just getting up myself, and there was no momentary confusion about it being some sort of horrible accident. But the gnawing in the pit of my stomach is about the same. All my prayers to the people of London this morning, who I am sure had hoped with the seeming resolution of the troubles that their city was done with craven attacks on ordinary people.

A very kind and generous cabal of Whig gentlemen have graciously invited me to join their group blog over at Reform Club, an invitation which I have accepted. I intend to continue posting here in addition to joining Reform Club, and in fact I think this has given me an easy solution to a problem that has been bothering me for some time. The problem is an outgrowth of my own personality, because I am interested in far more things than I can expect an outside audience to take an interest in. So long as GGE was my only online outlet, it was rather a mish-mash. So my solution is to express most of my political and economic opinions at Reform Club, and make GGE a more specifically Catholic blog. Also, they don't want me talking about my kids' school concerts or posting pictures of my sailboat over there, so that stays here as well.

And in so doing, makes obsolete one of my favorite lines summing up the micromanaging, split-the-difference nature of so much of the 5-4 jurisprudence that is the legacy of the Rehnquist Court: It's Sandra Day O'Connor's world and we just live in it. From redistricting to racial preferences to public displays of religion, O'Connor's maternally busybody opinions made sure that no one anywhere in America had any idea at any given time whether what he was doing was protected or forbidden by the Constitution. The only way to find out was to go ask Sandra.

Good riddance. She was never more than a mediocre legal mind. She never should have risen above the level of Arizona state legislator. I doubt very much that Bush will appoint a man to succeed her, although Jonah Goldberg has already suggested that Alberto Gonzalez could request sex-reassigment surgery:

Hispanic, transvestite, moderate: Who wouldn't vote for him?
(Not to be pedantic, but I believe he means transsexual, not transvestite. No one could tell if a Justice Gonzalez was wearing a Chanel suit under the robes anyway.) That means we get to scour the short lists of conservative female judges looking for someone to root for. The list of people to root against is depressingly long, I fear.

Update: I like, admire, and respect Ramesh Ponnuru. So much so, that I am far from above borrowing ideas from him. I do feel compelled to point out in this instance, however, that I flung the phrases "micromanaging" and "split-the-difference...jurisprudence" at Justice O'Connor almost a full hour before he did.