Into Great Silence

Lives Lived at a Monk's Pace, Allowing Time for the Spirit to Flourish

By A. O. SCOTT

Published: February 28, 2007

The Carthusian monks who are the subjects of Philip Gröning's documentary "Into Great Silence" do not, as the film's title suggests, have a great deal to say. Living in a light-filled stone charterhouse (as the order's monasteries are called) in a picturesque valley in the French Alps, they bind themselves to a vow not of literal silence but of extreme reticence. They pray and sing aloud, alone and together, and once a week the elders take an outdoor stroll during which some chatting is permitted.

Mr. Gröning's cameras (one of them operated by the pioneering digital videographer Anthony Dod Mantle) observe the brothers from afar, or unobtrusively within their cells, a discreet approach that occasionally gives way to head-on portraiture.

Only one monk, elderly and blind, speaks directly to the camera. Appearing near the end of the film, he muses on the nature of his vocation and the texture of his religious devotion. Past and present are human categories, he says, but "for God, there is no past, only present." Viewed from this perspective — from the standpoint of eternity — "Into Great Silence," with a running time of 162 minutes, is absurdly short.

Mr. Gröning, a German filmmaker, waited 16 years for permission to document the Carthusians, and this too seems like a trivial interval. The order was founded by St. Bruno of Cologne in 1084, and it appears that not much has changed in the lives of its adherents since then. A few concessions to modernity are visible: electric lights, a computer for keeping the books, and oranges and bananas in the middle of winter. But the rhythm of work, prayer and reflection —the attitude described as "joyful penitence" — flows in a cycle that feels not so much ancient as timeless.

And the film's achievement is to capture, within a brief, elliptical span, this slow, delicate rhythm. "Into Great Silence" is not about the Carthusians in the conventional sense that documentaries are about their subjects. It offers no background on the history or theology of the order, nor any information about the biographies of individual monks. Though we do witness the initiation and adaptation of two novices, we learn nothing about their previous lives or their reasons for joining.

The psychology and philosophy of asceticism are not Mr. Gröning's concern. He is after something more elusive and, from an aesthetic as well as an intellectual point of view, more valuable: a point of contact with the spiritual content of intense religious commitment.

He finds it by means of a visual style and an editing scheme that match the feeling and structure of the days and seasons as they pass through the charterhouse. Snow gives way to greenery, early morning light cycles around to darkness, and the viewer witnesses ordinary moments that add up to a persuasive representation of grace.

Not the thing itself — Mr. Gröning is not so vain as to suppose that a movie can provide a religious experience — but a preliminary understanding of its shape and weight. The sensual beauty of the images is part of this, but the film has more than lovely alpine vistas and arresting compositions of light and shade. Like the monks themselves, it is both humble and exalted.

And, in its way, eloquent. The idea of removing yourself entirely from the world is a radical one, and Mr. Gröning approaches it with fascination and a measure of awe. At first, as your mind adjusts to the film's contemplative pace, you may experience impatience. Where is the story? Who are these people? But you surrender to "Into Great Silence" as you would to a piece of music, noting the repetitions and variations, encountering surprises just when you think you've figured out the pattern. By the end, what you have learned is impossible to sum up, but your sense of the world is nonetheless perceptibly altered.

I hesitate, given the early date and the project's modesty, to call "Into Great Silence" one of the best films of the year. I prefer to think of it as the antidote to all of the others.

INTO GREAT SILENCE

Opens today in Manhattan.

Written (in English and Latin, with English subtitles), produced, directed and edited by Philip Gröning; director of photography, Mr. Gröning; released by Zeitgeist Films. At the Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, west of Avenue of the Americas, South Village. Running time: 162 minutes. This film is not rated.

Miles Wants to Change His Name (1994)

Miles and the Chocolate Pickle (1994)

Saturday, February 24, 2007

from the diary:

This atheism fad.
What a joke.
God defies definition.
God is not even a mystery.

Everything is material

Readers' Reviews
MUSIC AND LYRICS
jayme792 said: "Who knew the music and fan fervor of the '80s could be mined for such great fun!" (Four Stars)
cherry1967 said: "The plot was nonsense and it was dull." (One Star)

These blurbs were posted on the New York Times Arts and Leisure email page sent this morning. They are Readers Reviews of the new Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore movie, which Lee and I are going to see because she likes Hugh Grant and I like Drew Barrymore and next week, at the imaginary interstice between February 28 and March 1, we will be having our 27th wedding anniversary. Next year, leap year, we get to have a real one. Anyway, as you must have noticed, the first reviewer, jayme792, gives the movie four stars, asks a question that he (or she) ends with an exclamation mark, and concludes that for him or her the movie is 'great fun.' This little review, as such, also tells me a little bit about the movie, that it must have plot elements related to the "music and fan fervor of the '80s". So, fine. This is like a little consumer report and I am going to see the movie anyway. I hope cherry1967 is not giving away her (or his) age. Maybe this reviewer has a mint condition 1967 Ford Mustang that is red. I hope that's it, because a 40-year-old who considers it meaningful to post this as a review, when it is nothing of the sort, must be deluded, sort of, to consider that her experience of the movie is definitive, that she could say so dismissively, using the past tense, as though the movie were a historical relic (it can't be a consumer review, because the words refer to something that happened in the past), and actually believe her words to be objective and true. Then, she rates it "one star." None of this is in any way meaningful, enlightening, or helpful and, as you know, it is one of my pet peeves, when people publish themselves without even attempting to conform to standards of critical understanding. (One could say that these kinds of comments reflect the writer more than the work in question, because clearly some people did not think the movie plot was nonsense, some people found sense in it, and some people did not think it was dull. That was merely the experience of cherry1967. Her comments tell us nothing whatsoever about the movie. Is it about astronomy perhaps? Ira Gershwin?) Maybe she is a virgin, too, a 40-year-old virgin. Because, and this is why I am writing this to you yet again, I am not sure she can help having this perspective on the world. For her to have written about this movie in the present tense would have to be giving more credence and validity and reality to a mere movie. She really experiences movies, not as works of art that the viewer participates in examining, but as an out-of-body transcendence that is solely reflected in her own emotional and sensational experience. Maybe she is to be envied. Maybe she is, as I said, a virgin, or a near-virgin. Maybe she is like the pure young girl at the end of Fellini's La Dolce Vita, trying to speak to the debauched revellers on the other side of the shore after their wild night, on the seaside where a huge bloated sea monster of some sort has beached itself up. The young girl signals to the party people, tries to speak to them, but they cannot hear or understand her words. Is it a warning? A prophecy? A one-star review? They live in different worlds, the jet set Italians and the poor and pure innocent one, unable to cross the ocean bay to speak the same language, or at least put it in the same tense, and there is no hope of seeing the truth, eye to eye. But Fellini, bless his heart, was able to use it, to turn that gap of morality, of communication, to span that distance across his artificially created sea, with Nino Rota no doubt plinking along some wonderful, transcendent music to patch it together, a vision. I haven't seen that movie in some time. I'm listening to Yoko Ono right now. They posted her new album, Yes I'm a Witch, on the Russian MP3 download site. I always liked Yoko, even when others didn't. I liked her sense of art, her radicalism. But deep down inside me, because of my Bible upbringing, I still have an aversion to the idea of witches, even in the title. When I first started going to the movies, I was afraid that Jesus would come while I was sitting in a darkened theatre and I'd miss it, because I was in a profane (although enthralling) place, doing something for which I should be ashamed, sinning. I couldn't even think the word "hell" and it took decades to train myself to allow language to be itself, although sometimes I wonder if I might not have more control over circumstances if I had more control over those words popping into my head or appearing on this screen when my fingers move. I no longer worry about Jesus coming while I'm at the movies, though. Maybe cherry1967 does, since she went through that experience and told us about it as though it were something she had escaped from, scathed somewhat apparently, and she is primarily concerned about her aesthetic soul, not the artwork in question. It was dull, she writes, and nonsense. Maybe her senses weren't tickled. It was non-sense. To her. So, good for her. She escaped the theatre. Jesus didn't come while she was there being bored and wasting her time. I should thank her for giving me the opportunity to ponder her life this morning, based on her one-line review. If she were here now, I'd ask her if she is a virgin or a near-virgin and if that is why she cannot see things through the perspective of others' eyes and then I would ask her if she wanted to pray, to get down on her knees with me, maybe in her Mustang, and pray together in the present tense, to implore the deity for a vision, for common ground, for a heretofore missing ability to communicate, for insight above judgment. Maybe she'd like to hear my description of some spectacular seven-minute tracking shot in an otherwise meaningless movie. But she might find that dull as well, since she wasn't there. Or, if she was, she probably missed it. So it didn't count. In her eyes. In one eye and out the other and gone in 60 seconds before Jesus comes. That's how it works.

Stuck in the snow

Black Flag

"10 Miles from Home" (Henry and Amber)

Competition

To be better
But really
Better than.

My dad still says boy
Even for Obama or King
Or his dentist.
Still boys.

He had too many brothers
So it is hard-wired, soldered in cold



He doesn't have to strive
He is old now for ambition

Anything different works as well
Shia or Sikhs across the world
Anything away
The other football team
Homosexuals especially
What is poorer or
The wrong stripe on a uniform

Stupid me
Taking Jesus at his word
Thought there was no shame
In being least

With nothing to show

Fatigue

The poet W. S. Di Piero once described the work of the Sicilian novelist Leonardo Sciascia as "inquiries into the impossibility of justice and the terminal intellectual fatigue caused by disillusionment."

shoveling the stuff

shovelling the stuff, part two

VALENTINE'S DAY 2007

TO OLD AGE
I see in you the estuary that enlarges and spreads itself grandly
    as it pours in the great sea.
-- Walt Whitman


VALENTINE'S DAY 2007

My estuary is expanding
Toward the sea,
While my chi radiates outwards
to the pulsing universe.
As does my fleshy thighs
and plushing butt
These enlargements tho are well concealed
no underwear leave elastic marks revealed
Jogging pants and shirts
Large 2x and even 3
Is bigger better?
Is better... bigger?
My estuary is definitely expanding
Toward the sea.
-- LPS

I see in you, love,
Our estuary strong.
We were clean springs,
Trickles of youth, once.
Our streams merged
So long ago, like yesterday.
Those waters have not died,
They feed us still.
But spreading outward, forward,
The great sea before us,
Our flow endless,
From the ripple over stones
To the oceanic depths ahead,
Our age and time are syllables
We once imagined that we knew,
But now we hear the echoes from the singing
Of the distant whales,
Constant, ever new, always old,
Our music, you and I, listening.
-- PGS

Monday, February 5, 2007

Faith Unchosen

05 Feb 2007 09:12 am

Here's my latest email in the blogalogue with Sam Harris about faith and reason. The full blogalogue so far can be read here.

Dear Sam

Thanks for waiting for this belated response. As a form of apology, and since some readers have said I've ducked some of your specific questions in the past, perhaps I should answer your last question first. It may move things forward a little. You wrote:

"What would constitute "proof" for you that your current beliefs about God are mistaken? (i.e., what would get you to fundamentally doubt the validity of faith in general and of Christianity in particular?)"

It's a good question. It prompts me to say something I've been reluctant to talk about for reasons best expressed by Wittgenstein. But here goes anyway.

I have never doubted the existence of God. Never. My acceptance of God's existence - of a force beyond everything and the source of everything - goes so far back in my consciousness and memory that I can neither recall "finding" this faith nor being taught it. So when I am asked to justify this belief, as you reasonably do, I am at a loss. At this layer of faith, the first critical layer, the layer that includes all religious people and many who call themselves spiritual rather than religious, I can offer no justification as such. I have just never experienced the ordeal of consciousness without it. It is the air I have always breathed. I meet atheists and am as baffled at their lack of faith - at this level - as you are at my attachment to it. When people ask me how I came to choose this faith, I can only say it chose me. I have no ability to stop believing. Crises in my life - death of loved ones, diagnosis with a fatal illness, emotional loss - have never shaken this faith. In fact, they have all strengthened it. I know of no "proof" that could dissuade me of this, since no "proof" ever persuaded me of it.

I simply grew up from my earliest childhood in complete acceptance of this reality. I have had two serious crises of faith - but neither came close to a loss of faith in God's existence. The first crisis was the worst. Almost fourteen years ago, it occurred to me not that God didn't exist - that never occurred to me - but that God might be evil. I wrote about this experience - I remember precisely where and when it happened - in my spiritual memoir/essay, "Love Undetectable ." I will not reiterate it here. The "proof" I contemplated for thinking God was evil was the cliched conundrum of human suffering. It was a particularly grim moment in the plague years, when the suffering of good people I loved a lot began to get to my faith. Yes, I know this paradox might (and should) have occurred to me earlier in life. But it's also human to avoid these things most fully until those closest to you are struck down. So there I was, having my Job moment.

What proof, what argument, what evidence persuaded me that God was actually not evil but good? Nothing that will or should persuade you. The sense that evil was the ultimate victor in the universe, that evil is the fundamental meaning of all of this, that "none of this cares for us," to use Larkin's simple phrase: this sense pervaded me for a few minutes and then somehow, suddenly, unprompted by any specific thought, just lifted. I can no more explain that - or provide a convincing argument that it was anything more than your own moment of calm in Galilee. But I can say that it represented for me a revelation of God's love and forgiveness, the improbable notion that the force behind all of this actually loved us, and even loved me. The calm I felt then; and the voice with no words I heard: this was truer than any proof I have ever conceded, any substance I have ever felt with my hands, any object I have seen with my eyes.

You will ask: how do I know this was Jesus? Could it not be that it was a force beyond one, specific Jewish rabbi who lived two millennia ago and was executed by the Roman authorities? Yes, and no. I have lived with the voice of Jesus read to me, read by me, and spoken all around me my entire life - and I heard it that day. If I had been born before Jesus' birth, would I have realized this? Of course not. If I had been born in Thailand and raised a Buddhist, would I have interpreted this experience as a function of my Buddhist faith rather than Jesus? If I were a pilgrim right now in Iraq, would I attribute this epiphany to Allah? An honest answer has to be: almost certainly.

But I am a contingent human being in a contingent time and place and I heard Jesus. Do I believe that other religious traditions, even those that posit doctrines logically contrary to the doctrines of Jesus, have no access to divine truth? I don't. If God exists, then God will be larger and greater than our human categories or interpretations. I feel sure that all the great religions - and many minor ones - have been groping toward the same God. I don't need to tell you of the profound similarities in ethical and spiritual teaching among various faiths, as well as their differences. I believe what I specifically believe - but since the mystery of the divine is so much greater than our human understanding, I am not in the business of claiming exclusive truth, let alone condemning those with different views of the divine as heretics or infidels. We are all restless for the same God, for the intelligence and force greater than all of us, for that realm of being that the human mind senses but cannot achieve, longs for but cannot capture. But I've learned in that search that integral and indispensable to it is humility. And such humility requires relinquishing the impulse to force faith on others, to condemn those with different faiths, or to condescend to those who have sincerely concluded that there is no God at all. And when I read the Gospels recounting the sayings and actions of Jesus of Nazareth, I see a man so committed to that humility he was prepared to die under its weight.

I should add that this unchosen belief in God's existence - the "gift" of faith - does not prompt me to lose all doubt in my faith, or to abandon questioning. I have wrestled with all sorts of questions about any number of doctrines that the hierarchy of the church has insisted upon. As a gay man, I have been forced to do this perhaps more urgently than many others - which is one reason I regard my sexual orientation as a divine gift rather than as a "disorder". For me, faith is a journey that begins with the gift of divine revelation but never rests thereafter. It is nourished by a faith community we call the church, and is sustained by the sacraments, prayer, doubt and the love of friends and family. It is informed by reason, but it cannot end in reason.

I understand that this form of faith would provoke Nietzsche's contempt and James Dobson's scorn. But there is a wide expanse between nihilism and fundamentalism. I fear your legitimate concerns (which I share) about the dangers of religious certainty in politics have blinded you to the fertility of this expanse. And I think you're wrong that we religious moderates are mere enablers of fundamentalist intolerance. I think, rather, we have an important role in talking with atheists about faith and talking with fundamentalists about the political dangers of religious fanaticism, and the pride that can turn faith into absolutism.

In fact, people of faith who are not fundamentalists may be the most important allies you've got. Why don't you want us to help out?

Andrew

Stop Him Before He Gets More Experience

February 11, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
By FRANK RICH

AS the official Barack Obama rollout reaches its planned climax on "60 Minutes" tonight, we'll learn if he has the star power to upstage Anna Nicole Smith. But at least one rap against him can promptly be laid to rest: his lack of experience. If time in the United States Senate is what counts for presidential seasoning, maybe his two years' worth is already too much. Better he get out now, before there's another embarrassing nonvote on a nonbinding measure about what will soon be a four-year-old war.

History is going to look back and laugh at last week's farce, with the Virginia Republican John Warner voting to kill a debate on his own anti-surge resolution and the West Virginia Democrat Robert Byrd seizing the occasion for an hourlong soliloquy on coal mining. As the Senate pleasured itself with parliamentary one-upmanship, the rate of American casualties in Iraq reached a new high.

The day after the resolution debacle, I spoke with Senator Obama about the war and about his candidacy. Since we talked by phone, I can't swear he was clean, but he was definitely articulate. He doesn't yet sound as completely scripted as his opponents — though some talking-point-itis is creeping in — and he isn't remotely defensive as he shrugs off the race contretemps du jour prompted by his White House run. Not that he's all sweetness and light. "If the criterion is how long you've been in Washington, then we should just go ahead and assign Joe Biden or Chris Dodd the nomination," he said. "What people are looking for is judgment."

What Mr. Obama did not have to say is that he had the judgment about Iraq that his rivals lacked. As an Illinois state senator with no access to intelligence reports, he recognized in October 2002 that administration claims of Saddam's "imminent and direct threat to the United States" were hype and foresaw that an American occupation of Iraq would be of "undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences." Nor can he be pilloried as soft on terrorism by the Cheney-Lieberman axis of neo-McCarthyism. "I don't oppose all wars," he said in the same Chicago speech. "What I am opposed to is a dumb war."

Now that Mr. Obama has passed through Men's Vogue, among other stations of a best-selling author's cross of hype, he wants to move past the dumb phase of Obamamania. He has begun to realize "how difficult it is to break through the interest in me on the beach or that my wife's made me stop sneaking cigarettes." He doesn't expect to be elected the leader of the free world because he "can tell a good joke on Jay Leno." It is "an open question and a legitimate question," he says, whether he can channel his early boomlet into an electoral victory.

No one can answer that question at this absurdly early stage of an absurdly long presidential race. But Mr. Obama is well aware of the serious criticisms he engenders, including the charge that he is conciliatory to a fault. He argues that he is "not interested in just splitting the difference" when he habitually seeks a consensus on tough issues. "There are some times where we need to be less bipartisan," he says. "I'm not interested in cheap bipartisanship. We should have been less bipartisan in asking tough questions about entering into this Iraq war."

He has introduced his own end-the-war plan that goes beyond a split-the-difference condemnation of the current escalation. His bill sets a beginning (May) and an end (March 31, 2008) for the phased withdrawal of combat troops, along with certain caveats to allow American military flexibility as "a big, difficult, messy situation" plays out during the endgame. Unlike the more timid Senate war critics, including Hillary Clinton, Mr. Obama has no qualms about embracing a plan with what he unabashedly labels "a timeline."

But he has no messianic pretensions and is enough of a realist to own up to the fact that his proposal has no present chance of becoming law. Nor do any of the other end-the-war plans offered by Congressional Democrats — some overlapping his, some calling for a faster exit than his. If a nonbinding resolution expressing mild criticism of President Bush's policy can't even come to a vote in the Senate, legislation demanding actual action is a nonstarter. All the Democrats' parrying about troop caps, timelines, benchmarks, the cutting off of war funding, whatever, is academic except as an index to the postures being struck by the various presidential hopefuls as they compete for their party's base. There simply aren't 60 votes in the Senate to force the hand of a president who, in Mr. Obama's words, "is hellbent on doing what he's been doing for the last four years."

Unless, of course, Republicans join in. The real point of every Iraq proposal, Mr. Obama observes, is to crank up the political heat until "enough pressure builds within the Republican Party that they essentially revolt." He argues that last week's refusal to act on a nonbinding resolution revealed just how quickly that pressure is building. If the resolution didn't matter, he asks, "why were they going through so many hoops to avoid the vote?" He seconds Chuck Hagel's celebrated explosion before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, when "he pointed at folks" and demanded that all 100 senators be held accountable for their votes on what Senator Hagel called "the most divisive issue in this country since Vietnam."

That's why Mr. Obama is right when he says that the individual 2008 contests for the Senate and the House are at least as important as the presidential race when it comes to winding down the war: "Ultimately what's going to make the biggest difference is the American people, particularly in swing districts and in Republican districts, sending a message to their representatives: This is intolerable to us."

That message was already sent by many American voters on Election Day in 2006. Rahm Emanuel, the Illinois congressman who, with his Senate counterpart, Chuck Schumer, oversaw that Democratic takeover, smells the blood of more Republicans in "marginal districts" in 2008. His party is now in the hunt for fresh candidates, including veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. Such is the sense of impending doom among House Republicans that their leader, John Boehner, told CNN on Jan. 23 that he could render a verdict on whether the latest Bush Iraq strategy is "working" in a mere "60 to 90 days."

In the Senate, even the rumor of a tough opponent is proving enough to make some incumbents flip overnight from rubber-stamp support of the White House's war policy to criticism of the surge. Norm Coleman of Minnesota started running away from his own record the moment he saw the whites of Al Franken's eyes. Another endangered Republican up for re-election in 2008, John Sununu of New Hampshire, literally sprinted away from the press, The Washington Post reported, rather than field questions about his vote on the nonbinding resolution last week.

My own guess is that the Republican revolt will be hastened more by the harsh reality in Iraq than any pressure applied by Democratic maneuvers in Congress. Events are just moving too fast. While senators played their partisan games on Capitol Hill, they did so against the backdrop of chopper after chopper going down on the evening news. The juxtaposition made Washington's aura of unreality look obscene. Senator Warner looked like such a fool voting against his own principles ("No matter how strongly I feel about my resolution," he said, "I shall vote with my leader") that by week's end he abruptly released a letter asserting that he and six Republican colleagues did want a debate on an anti-surge resolution after all. (Of the seven signatories, five are up for re-election in 2008, Mr. Warner among them.)

What anyone in Congress with half a brain knows is that the surge was sabotaged before it began. The latest National Intelligence Estimate said as much when it posited that "even if violence is diminished," Iraq's "absence of unifying leaders" makes political reconciliation doubtful. Not enough capable Iraqi troops are showing up and, as Gen. Peter Pace told the Senate last week, not enough armored vehicles are available to protect the new American deployments. The State Department can't recruit enough civilian officials to manage the latest push to turn on Baghdad's electricity and is engaged in its own sectarian hostilities with the Pentagon. Revealingly enough, the surge's cheerleaders are already searching for post-Rumsfeld scapegoats. William Kristol attacked the new defense secretary, Robert Gates, for "letting the Joint Chiefs slow-walk the brigades in."

Washington's conventional wisdom has it that the worse things go in the war, the more voters will want to stick with the tried and true: Clinton, McCain, Giuliani. But as Mr. Obama reminds us, "Nobody had better Washington résumés than Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld." In the wake of the catastrophe they and their enablers in both parties have made, the inexperienced should have a crack at inheriting the earth, especially if they're clean.

Announcement day

Help me, Obama-wan-Kenobi, you're my only hope.

The Report 2/1/07

Groundhog Day Eve.  It was a dark and stormy night.  Actually, it wasn't stormy.  But it was dark.

The Admiral played hatless, which -- apart from being a first in the long tradition of Men o Poker -- may have contributed to his dip in the final standings.  JD wore his usual yellow cap.  Spike wore a stylish Minnesotan fishing hap that looked like there should be flies buzzing over it.  TW, of course, wore his Michigan cap.  And PG wore an old, stained Krispy Kreme cap.

PG took notes on each hand played, but they turned out to be illegible the next morning.  Still the chronology of play went something like this:

1) Admiral dealt Spit in the Ocean.  JD started betting heavily.  Someone noticed that JD had more cards than everyone else.  The hand was withdrawn.  A dud hand.
2) JD dealt old baseball.  TW won, thus beginning a streak of terrible proportions.
3 through 7) TW began a round of Texas Hold 'Em, otherwise known as Pineapple for Dummies, in order to teach the group how to play. He schooled us, all right.  TW won five out of five hands.  The game was immediately banished to the netherworld where lie Between the Sheets and Crazy 8s.
8) PG dealt Criss Cross.  The Admiral won.
9) Spike also dealt Criss Cross. He also dealt himself five aces and won the pot.
10) The Admiral dealt new baseball and had to match the pot when he turned up a 3.  He and Spike both had flushes in the end, but Admiral won with king high.
11) Inspired by the last game, JD dealt Best Flush.  PG won when everybody else folded.
12) TW dealt TW rules. Admiral won with a pair of aces.
13) PG dealt five card draw and PG won with a pair of jacks, this being the 13th hand and 13 is his lucky number.
14)  Spike  dealt TW rules and won with two pair.
15) The Admiral dealt new baseball again and had to match the pot again! What follows here in the notes are a bunch of unintelligible scribbles.  Apparently Spike won, but it was close and perhaps contested.
16) JD dealt low ball and PG won with a very low count of 13 (his lucky number).
17) TW dealt Criss Cross and TW won Criss Cross with five of a kind.  Someone noticed that JD had not yet won a hand.
18) PG, attempting to reclaim the good name of Pineapple from the stinging Texas Hold 'Em round at the top of the night, and -- due to the fact that he had lost more money than anyone, dealt Pineapple.  Either TW or Spike won; the notes are unclear.
19) Spike dealt TW rules and won this time.

At this point in the proceedings, it was clear that some of the players were intent upon winning the sexually suggestive baseball cap that the Admiral had contributed to the pot at the outset, a black dripping lubricant cap that would be given to the evening's loser.  PG, while clearly in the "lead" at this point, was starting to be challenged for the hat by the increasingly bad playing of JD.

20) The Admiral tried to start all over, once again dealing Spit in the Ocean.  Lots of people had three kings, but TW won with an ace high besides.
21) JD dealt low ball again.  PG bet heavily, scared everybody off, and won again with 17.  "There goes the hat!" gloated JD.
22) TW dealt new baseball and the Admiral won with five of a kind.

Here's where things start to get fuzzy.  Both Spike and the Admiral were caught trying to manipulate the deck of Champion Spark Plug cards, the Admiral in particular crunching the deck as though trying to mark cards, perhaps to change his luck.  The cards themselves tended to fly toward PG's side of the table and fall on the floor, and JD at one point did an under the table exchange of cards.  Spike started reciting bizarre poetry, mispronouncing cilantro and pondering the difference between herbs and spices.  Whatever hand was dealt next, PG won with five queens, leading JD to pout, "I didn't want the hat THAT bad."   Spike dealt TW rules and PG continued to bet heavily, causing all others to fold.  The Admiral dealt the Anarchy round and, out of sympathy, it was awarded to JD, who had in an earlier round, conceding defeat, had placed the black lubricant baseball cap on top of his yellow cap and went home wearing two hats.

Here end the notes, leaving out discussions of evangelical Christian movies, Mike Mulberry, predators in the public schools, the Super Bowl, the huge indebtedness of the scoundrel Paco, and other topics of continuing interest.