Please go Google this phrase right now.

For a good laugh, fire up Google and type in the phrase "Self-indulgent sentimental, whiny drivel that stretches analogies till they snap".

Or if you are lazy, just click here. 

Then check out the top link.

Here's a good but longer review to read if you have more time.
 

One last selfie

What can I say? The lighting was just ethereal and really flattered me, making me look wise beyond my years, I think.

The Dante Trail trail: E Beeros, Christos

Eh...I might have fudged the Latin a bit. Whatever.

This post wraps up Rod's Italian vacation and our studious following of it as well. A quick synopsis:

Rod likes the Benedictine monastery in Norcia, a lot, for a whole host of reasons, but beer seems to be the one shoving itself into the camera frame. Three of the five pics in his last overseas post were either of or about the beer they brew, and his general takeaway was that the beer helped them bring people to the Church, hence the subtitle of our post.

This could also be a revealing element of Rod's teologia dei suini which we've been unpacking here, namely that, for some souls like Rod, everything that goes in their goozlepipe comes to be regarded as a divine sacrament.

Rod would also like us to know, PAULI, PIK, and DIANE

I told the monks a bit of my story, about how I became Orthodox. There was no sense of judgment or hardness toward me for having left the Catholic Church.

So there.

I graded the beer pics as food pics, bringing our final tote to:

Total pics: 43 - 100%

Selfies: 7 - 16% of total

Things Rod Ate: 12 - 24% of total

Hope someone out there had the winning square. I didn't. I had bet on more selfies, but food took the lead in the final straightaway

Our final Dante Trail trail takeaway: given the preview we've seen on the Dante Trail trail, boy, howdy, will Rod be batting out of his league trying to fuse a figure like Dante into his personal spiritual maelstrom.

There's been no hint so far that his engagement with Dante in Italy has been anything beyond travel guide name- and place-dropping, while the overwhelming focus of the content has been Rod's comestible-obsessed feeling tour of the small part of Italy he could afford to visit.

An honest book about Rod for those for whom he's their spiritual guru? That would sell, to those people. A serious, scholastically researched book about Dante? Well, maybe there's still room for another one, even by an amateur.

But a book where Rod in effect only rubs Dante's head for luck while leading us on a pseudo-Dantean journey through his own personal Hell? This is bait for the publishing Erinyes, fer sure. May they be merciful and not take his eyes.

And with this I'll hand it over to our readers. What sort of Dante-based book about saving Rod's life would you or anyone you know be likely to buy?

On the Dante Trail trail: Behold, America: A Ham Tree!

Now we're talking. Our third Station of the Belly: charcuterie, the sacrament of the teologia dei suini and its apostle.

To leaven lurking little voices like this

The primi piatti was spaghetti with mushrooms and black truffles, and the secondi was a mixed grill that included, yes, wild boar. I wish I had a boar piglet sleeping at the foot of my bed tonight. And I wish Nonna would come by and bring me warm milk and tell me a bedtime story.

with at least some alibi of spirituality we also get this sworn testimony

I spent an hour today praying my prayer rule in front of the altar of the crypt church, underneath the church you see above.

Why an hour rather than 50 minutes or an hour ten isn't specified, and as usual how anyone but Rod would really know isn't either, but I think the message comes through loud and clear: Rod is a prayer athlete, no doubt also explaining his inexhaustible need for fuel, particularly black truffles which contain the vital amino acid precarosine.

Those of us who maybe pray for five minutes or so at bedtime for our family and friends would clearly be out of our league in this sort competitive exhibition.

Not to put to fine a point on it, but an hour of prayer taken from the day is an hour that wasn't spent learning much about Dante, which tends to reinforce my suspicion that the Dante book will be more about Rod's interior life than about Dante and his work. You, potential Dante book reader, will in turn be vicariously saved, not so much by Dante, but by absorbing these various sensibilities of the athletic apostle we're following here as if they were a spiritual vapor rub.

The ham tree and its associated signs from this SOTB shift our tote board once again:

Total pics: 38 - 100%

Selfies: 7 - 18% of total

Things Rod Ate: 9 - 24% of total

Our Dante Trail trail takeaway this evening: by your works you shall be known. Although our following leads with this piety, salted with the language of the donkey-born traveler of yore

Casella and I find ourselves lodging here tonight. We came to make a pilgrimage to the church and monastery built over the birthplace of the saint and his twin sister, St. Scholastica. A happy, happy benefit of coming here is that Norcia (Nursia, to Americans) is known for cured meats, wild boar, and truffles.

the picture sequence reveals a completely opposite set of priorities. As Rod himself says, there's a lesson here for us Christians in these times.

On the Dante Trail trail: Groundhog Day

Basically, yesterday's offering with different postcard pics: Anthony Bourdain and Rick Steves do Ravenna in a day, glowing.

Our tote update (no selfies, one food pic together with one of the building in which it was consumed):

Total pics: 13 - 100%

Selfies: 7 - 21% of total

Things Rod Ate: 3 - 18% of total

I probably shouldn't be prematurely dismissive. There are things to be gleaned from today's adventure that surely shed some light on what the Dante-book-to-be will contain, such as this megachurch mailer boilerplate:

A short film I saw at the Dante Museum next to his tomb speculated on how the mosaics the poet saw in Ravenna, where he lived the final years of his life and where he wrote Paradiso, may have given him visual ideas. It’s a lovely thought, and there might be something to it. They certainly give me thoughts — Dantean ones about God’s glory, and how everything in this world is a reflection of the world beyond it. And how all things can be made to work in harmony for God’s glory.

If only they could make potato chips this diaphanous and one-dimensional.

And for those of you holding on to hope that Rod will one day return to the Catholic Church, this follows:

Casella says I’m still culturally Catholic, and he’s right to a significant extent, but this trip has made me realize how deeply Orthodox the Divine Liturgy has made me over these last eight years. I felt at home in S. Vitale in a way that I did not in any of the Catholic churches we entered, except for the Baptistery in Florence — but its ceiling is covered with dazzling mosaics. The way we pray really is the way we believe. Anyway, Casella and I pray for the reunion of our churches.

Who doesn't pray for such things simple good and true if they do? Anyway, the best way to follow Rod's theological fan dance is to ensure that he keeps on writing about it, and right now the very best way to ensure that he keeps on writing about it is to make your generous tax-deductible contribution to TAC today. Just thought I'd connect those implicit dots for any takers out there.

So...today's Dante Trail trail takeaway. To me so far this pilgrimage doesn't remotely read like any sort of serious book research trip (mainly because so much time and energy has been spent food and travel blogging), and because I'm not the sort of person given to painting pants on emperors not wearing any, this leads me to think one or both of two possible things explain what I see.

First and foremost, that Rod is almost certainly doing this on his own very thin dime - if this is Wednesday, this must be Ravenna - I can almost see Mrs. Dreher counting the budget out of the cookie jar herself - and if it's his money, well by golly it's going to get spent primarily on what he wants to do most (eat; then eat some more).

Second, yep: he's going to try to wing the Dante book with just the sort of filler I first quoted above. After all, the central focus of the book is how Dante saved - whose? That's right, not yours: Rod's life.

So what you will end up getting, potential Rod's Dante book buyer, will be something much like our meta-derivative Dante Trail trail itself: a richly Dante-flavored Rod-centric soy product giving you (at hardback prices) that elusive hope that somehow reading about how Rod claims reading Dante saved him from a murky bouillabaisse of something - mono? depression? impacted colon? middle age? being loathed into deblogging by his home town? - that for the sake of economy he'll shorthand as "his life".

Because he wasn't really contemplating suicide, was he? Because that would be a sin. Remember that, you already fated to have read the Dante book some time from now.

On the Dante Trail trail: Faking It to the Streets

With Danteworld Rod has given up pretending the Dante Trail has any real substantive connection to the hoped for Dante book-to-be and is instead basically just giving us Uncle Ed's and Aunt Sylvia's Kodak Carousel slide show of their retirement vacation in blog form.

This will not be a long post, because I can’t gather my thoughts now.

Hey, no kidding? Same thing happens to me. But when it does, I don't buttonhole strangers on the street to inform them, "This will not be a long sentence, because I can’t gather my thoughts now." I just don't say anything. But, then I'm not a writer. Come to think of it, isn't it a writer's job to be able to gather their thoughts? To be able to describe the Dante Trail in Sienna?

Of course, if the real payload is you - what you're eating, what your facial expression is at this exact moment, what you're wearing right now, the quality of lodging you demand, your tastes in music - then gathering your thoughts really doesn't matter, does it. As with the Pharaohs of old, whatever comes out the hole becomes valuable by virtue of its source.

Welcome to Rodworld...Unplugged.

Still smarting from Diane's smack down, today on the Dante Trail trail there is not one selfie, only one food pic, but eight picture postcards from Ravenna, bringing our score now to:

Total pics: 13 - 100%

Selfies: 7 - 26% of total

Things Rod Ate: 3 - 19% of total

One of the reasons I continue to refer to Diane's effect on Dreher's subsequent behavior is that his subsequent writing is clearly responsive to what we just previously have discussed here in EQE. Today's Important Message To All: (1) Rod's not gay; no, honest; and (2) no matter what passions Sidney Bechet may incite in two men vacationing together in romantic Tuscany,

We crossed the bridge over the Arno and bought gelato for dessert, and walked back to our place, glowing. We spoke of how much we loved our wives and our children, and how blessed we are to have families. As much as I have loved Florence, I really can’t wait to go back home to Julie and the children — and I am so very, very grateful to be able to rest in them, and in their love. This kind of inner peace is what I’ve been searching for all my life, and God has given it to me in them, and in my faith.

Got that? He wrote in down right there. I should interject at this point that one of the reasons I'm a bit late to this Dante Trail trail update is that I've been handing out crisp $100 bills all morning to what seems to be an endless line of underprivileged but adorable children as they file past my desk. Not only did I pray for each one individually as each smiled at me, eyes streaming with tears of gratitude, I also prudently instructed each one not to spend it all in one place. Oh, and in addition to praying over each child individually, I also stopped and prayed eleven other additional times this morning. I'm telling you all this so you can make a note of it about me and tell your friends as well.

Speaking of prayer, apparently Yahweh has loosened the no-others-before-Him policy since HR first posted it back in the day:

The hotel is close to Dante’s tomb, so that’s where we went. How strange it was to approach it for the first time! Casella knew what the moment meant to me, and let me go in alone. I kissed Dante’s tomb and went to my knees, touching my forehead to the cold marble floor in a gesture of honor. I stood and prayed to him, thanking him for what he has done for me, and asking his blessing on my writing.

Who knew?

So let's gather our thoughts and wrap it up, shall we? Today's Dante Trail Takeaway: writing is the Philosopher's Stone, man; you can use it to create any reality you desire out of whatever you have at hand, even nothing at all.

Bonus takeaway: how do you make something about Dante? Simple: attach his name to it. Turns out others have already beat Rod and me to it.

Billboard, driving to work today: "Big Dante Tire Sale. Buy 3, Get the 4th One Free!"

Radio: "Dante Night at the Ryman Auditorium, Nashville, Tennessee"

Lunch: "Have it Your Dante Way Today" That's right, dude: with prosciutto.

On the Dante Trail trail: Shamed By Diane

After a quickie food pic revealing the sort of accommodations you're never going to enjoy in Italy, follower, as well as a coy tease of the mysterious Casella's slender right arm, finally a post not immediately wallowing in appetite and other narcissitic self-indulgence, one obviously a product of having been directly shamed into it by Diane. Which is only to say this, really: there were four pictures of art and architecture, allowing the tide of food and selfies to recede for the moment. For those who may be wagering in an office pool:

Total pics: 13 - 100%

Selfies: 7 - 39% of total

Things Rod Ate: 3 - 22% of total

Fear not. We are still following the same Rod. If you didn't know how devout he was, he's Johnny-on-the-spot  here ready to remind you he's one of the elect:

There were only about 30 people there in the side chapel; the cathedral only let people in who wanted to pray. I prayed before the relics of St. Zenobius (337-417), the first bishop of Florence, and again in front of the famed painting of Dante presenting the Commedia to Florence (it is much, much darker than the usual depictions).

But what's drehery devotion without the requisite intramural one-upmanship?

Earlier in the day we had been to mass. Casella and James C. are Catholic traditionalists. I couldn’t find an Orthodox liturgy around town, so I accompanied them. It was a beautiful mass, but it really made me feel how deeply Orthodox I have become liturgically.

Gee, what a shame Dante's Catholic Italy couldn't have been more appropriately Orthodox. But...oh, dear! Is Rod taking risks with his health as the price of taking us with him?

After a while, I began to feel a little dizzy, and had to step out for air. I walked around the block, looking to buy a bottle of water. I found one, then returned to the church and sat on the steps reading the Purgatorio, Canto 10.

Thank God he made it through that, and bless him for informing us of every beep in his health mood. Oh, he makes a brief comment about Dante, too. After the intestines are packed like sausages, that's what it's all about, you know.

And...here we go: like a Berkshire hog awkwardly tottering on his rear trotters, sheepishly trying to mumble his way through a Rosary while remnant slops dribble from his snout, Rod ensures we will not be bereft of a foodie peek:

We had lunch after mass, then gelato — fig and ricotta, black sesame, and pistachio for me — then picked up our tickets for the Uffizi.

But it's as a guide to the art he's experiencing for us, living the experience for us because we can't be there that he truly shines in this post. Here's the description, so richly nuanced with detail that only Rod can describe it this way:

The luminous genius of Botticelli and Michelangelo, in particular, defy my ability to describe. Eventually I just stopped trying to articulate to myself why these paintings were so great, and tried to allow myself to experience them directly....Eventually it’s too much. All that light and beauty is overwhelming.

Okay, sorry. I lied. Like most of the ideas he tries to take credit for articulating, he just fakes his way through this, too. Wouldn't "Wow!" have just been more honest and succinct?

And the takeaway from today's following of Rod following in Dante's footsteps on the Dante Trail trail: why, how Rod confronts his mid-life crisis head on, of course.

Heading toward 50, married to a woman who while she's aged tremendously from the post-teen he initially snagged is currently reveling in her biological prime, just having assumed another mortgage in a rural suburb whose locals forced him to delete his local blog - where, where can Peter escape to?

Back to youth, of course, back to the dreamy Never Never Land of all night college bull sessions:

Tonight James, Casella and I finished with dinner in our apartment. We ate good Italian food and drank good Italian wine and listened to Sidney Bechet, and then Louis Armstrong, and talked about God and Dante and Florence. Stepping into the kitchen to get more water for the table, I thought that this is the kind of moment I dreamed of when I was younger — a night like this, filled with friendship, music, food, and conversation about ideas.

We aren't really on the trail of Dante here at all, followers, we're on the trail of Rod's youth, fleeing him ever more rapidly with each passing month. Adulthood and its responsibilities will be left to Mrs. Dreher, back home where she belongs.

Oh, but he did give a beggar woman a few coins, so there's that.

Will that be enough to save our spiky-haired Pan once Italy is behind him, after he's back, marooned in rural Louisiana with a woman in her prime ten years younger and the kids' college depending on him selling the Dante book he'll still have to write? We'll just have to wait and see.

On the Dante Trail trail: Selfiepalooza

H/T to cailleachbhan for our latest beating: "Florence Diary", which has that journalistically important sound like Berlin Diary but in reality is more the sort of thing your great aunt with the enormous bosom used to abuse you with as a child.

Four, count em', four Rod selfies, each more oleaginously self-indulgent than the last.

This brings our filosofia di suini tote now to:

Total pics: 13 - 100%

Selfies: 7 - 54% of total

Things Rod Ate: 2 - 23% of total

More if anything worth reading breaks, like Rick Steves dropping a Twitter scolding on Rod for cutting in on his action.

(A correction to our previous tote: selfies were 38% of the total, not 25%.)

On the Dante Trail trail: Those Delicious Creamy Boar Squeazins

Following Rod Dreher on the Dante Trail trail we've now arrived at our second Station of the Belly, Taverna San Giuseppe. After a token shout-out to the Madonna as a stand-in for the therapeutic aesthetics of historical locales, Rod professes his true faith, what the Italians in their wisdom refer to as filosofia di suini:

Let me tell you, with no fear of contradiction: after the meal we had today, this place is holy ground.

And, happy day, today we are able to add both another selfie and another picture of what Rod ate to our treasured album of memories.

The first is a real keeper: Rod looking either post-orgasmic as he contemplates his communion



or, now that I think about it, more like Ruprecht after being granted permission to make room for more on site.



The second pic probably was the source generously afforded us as the subtitle of our post.

Incidentally, to reduce clutter from now on we'll only keep score on the selfies and food pics out of the total. To date:

Total pics: 7 - 100%

Selfies: 3 - 25% of total

Things Rod Ate: 2 - 25%  of total

As Rod and Casella depart on the bus like Joe Buck and Ratso headed to Miami, Rod reflects on his Tuscan good fortune

How did this happen? It’s all grace. As Piccardà said, “In His will is our peace.”

True. It could all go away tomorrow, but I would have had this, not deserving any of it, and for that I am grateful. I can hardly tell you how grateful. It’s too much sometimes. Dante teaches that there is no way to work yourself to heaven; all you can do is work to make yourself open to grace when it appears. This is also true, and not only true, but important.

Now as I recall, there was something more to it than grace, or, if it were grace, surely the source of it all was a sad and tragic sort of grace. How Rod arrived at the point pictured above, how this really happened was:

- Rod was in the process of being released from his employment at The John Templeton Foundation

- His agent, who I definitely want negotiating my next new car purchase, managed to snag him a $900,000+ advance for an exploitative, tell-all book about his sister dying of cancer.

- The book hasn't sold all that well, but, hey, there's still a bunch of that grace still in the bank

- Enough to fund an eating vacation to Tuscany, because, given the sales of the sister book, there doesn't seem to have been another advance this time around

Hmmm...I think I've heard of this sort of grace before.

Anyway, what is the real lesson we've learned today at our second Station of the Belly? Right.

That nothing can keep a dark cloud like stinging flies at bay like a heapin' mess o' delicious creamy boar squeazins shared among beloved male companions, far from home under the romantic Tuscan sun.

Grace indeed.

On the Dante Trail trail: Week 1 - After The Beans

Bor-ring. Not so much as a Golden Corral in sight.

There hasn't been much to follow since our initial Station of the Belly, mostly some Fodor's type stuff re-branded with Rod's feelings to make it come alive for folks who have difficulty reading Fodor's. The lack of posting suggests Rod's holed up some place after the Buca Mario feeding working things out, so to speak. Interesting fact: according to Google, in Italian Buca Mario means "Buca Mario".

Some highlights of this following for our Dante Trail trail followers:

I knew this before I came to Florence, of course,

It’s that kind of place.

Casella and I are so grateful to Bill Stephany for his generosity this morning. His passion for Dante, and for Florence, were such a gift to us. I said to him, “Bill, my wife asked me the other day at what point one becomes saturated with Dante, and can’t take any more. What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never known it to happen to anyone.”

I think this concluding quote gives us much to think about, don't you?

All was not lost, however - there was another selfie! For those keeping score at home, the complete visual record of the Dante Trail to date contains:

Selfies: 2

Pictures of things Rod ate: 1

A picture of a river and some bridges: 1

Both the second selfie and the picture of a river and some bridges were captioned "Bill Stephany, my Virgil today", which has an implicit importance so profound I think I'll jump to another paragraph to fully unpack it for our Dante Trail trail followers:

See, by referring to the third man in the Dante rendezvous as Virgil, Rod is telling us we should think of him on his Dante Trail as Dante himself. However you want to slice it, that's pretty heavy, dude.

But the real question is: will it make the Rod-as-Walker Percy jealous?

On the Dante Trail trail: Week 1

While I was sleeping off that imaginary gut slug of Chef Boy-Ar-Dee goodness, Coalition of the Dante Trail Trail Followers follower Pikumatti has alterted us to the first Station of the Belly on our Dante Trail trail following quest, so, without further ado, let's get into it, shall we?

For the same reason that many seemingly staid professionals will anomalously hold their conventions in exotic cities populated on such occasions by stunning business women perched on impossibly high heels, the first Station of the Belly on our pilgrimage is, naturally, Buca Mario, where, as Pik has already mentioned, Rod and his Beatrice "Casella" dined on bistecca fiorentina, Tuscan white beans in olive oil, and a Brunello di Montalcino, as well as pappardelle with cinghiale (wild boar) ragu, and a salad of fresh sliced porcini mushrooms, shaved Pecorino, and a kind of greens they couldn’t quite identify.

First the mysterious "Casella", then mystery greens! Is it any wonder Rod Dreher is a far more intriguing subject to himself than Dante or anything else in Creation for that matter? But before we explore the mystery of the greens, I'm certain our Dante Trail trail followers will have some searching if not astringent questions concerning those Tuscan white beans.

To the point, were they properly prepared to rid them of their earthly oligosaccharides? Boiling them too long would render their delicately bland mealy texture indelicate while robbing them of flavor, so prolonged soaking would have to have been mandated. But was it? That's obviously another mystery. To get the full wind of this problem we are fortunate enough to have Pasquale Buonifagio's treasured parchment fragment as our source and guide:

Fagioli , fagioli la frutta musicale
Quanto più si mangia , più si toot
Quanto più si toot , meglio si sente
Quindi cerchiamo di avere fagioli con ogni pasto!

Pedants may quibble about some of the more superficial points raised, But I think Buonifagio has long ago settled this for most rightthinking individuals. Still, in addition to the mystery of the Tuscan white bean preparation there remains the mystery of one single or multiple rooms, obviously a factor in any subsequent revelations on the subject.

And now to the greens. Our Dante follower would have immediately identified kale if it were included, so, given the circumstances, our best guess must point us to some gaily deceiving combo of Swiss chard, escarole, and broccoli rabe, or maybe just rapini alone, whatever any of those happen to be. Me, I'm happy with plain old mustard greens with a little hot pepper sauce.

But, ultimately, our Dante Trail trail following has already pointed us to a potentially lucrative business opportunity: supplying Buca Mario with a steady inventory of cheap and plentiful wild hogs at a ridiculous markup. Unfortunately, we may have competition on this wild hog offshoot leg of the Dante Trail trail.

Stay tuned.

On the Dante Trail trail: Week 0

No, friends and readers, the title of the post doesn't contain a redundant typo, it describes the upcoming gratuitously self-indulgent journey we are about to embark on following in the footsteps of Rod Dreher as he follows in the footsteps of the famous Italian poet Dante Alighieri, whose footsteps have repeatedly been followed in since sometime after his death in 1321. That's a lot of footsteps following if you ask me.

So since there cannot possibly be anything new and interesting to learn about Dante himself which hasn't already been documented far more richly elsewhere, it's fairly obvious that what we'll be discovering along our journey will be Rod's and, derivatively, my own aesthetic sensibilities as they are variously stimulated along the way.

If you can imagine a Rick Steves food and architecture tour focusing our breathless anticipation on someone like Oprah Winfrey's overstated moment-by-moment account of their overall sensible experience as they bite into a creamy gelato while their bottom explores the contours of an antique Italian chair, I think you'll have a good idea of the excitement to come.

Not only will we be following a follower, we'll also be following the follower's followers as they follow him themselves, giving us the richest aesthetic Moralistic Therapeutic Conservative sensibility experience possible .

I can't wait.