Saturday, February 29, 2020
Appreciation …
… Anderson: It was a life of words – and fields – for prairie poet from Fargo - StarTribune.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Throughout it all, after making and losing and making again millions of dollars in insurance, venture capitalism and farming (he once said his farm job was hardest of all: “I borrow the money’’), and publishing multiple books of poetry, he remained at his core a wingshooter who regularly rose at dawn to load his Labradors and follow his truck’s headlights onto North Dakota prairies.
Understanding Henry …
… The Best Sex I’ve Read Was By the Dick-Centric Henry Miller. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Most of what I remember of Miller’s writing is incredibly dick-centric. This is one of the few passages I remember where he’s praising someone’s vagina. And the portrait of her is just so vivid. I remember her having gold teeth and trotting around in the street, aggressively looking for customers and throwing back a drink. There’s a feeling of her as a person, but also that she has acquired this at great cost — she’s obtained this love for herself and ability to have great pleasure with effort. It hasn’t just been handed to her..
Something to think on …
A lot happens by accident in poetry.
— Howard Nemerov, born on this date in 1920
Staying put …
… These photos show holdout houses giving the finger to redevelopment. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Anniversary …
… The Dependencies by Howard Nemerov | Poetry Foundation. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Today marks the centenary of Howard Nemerov’s birth.
Friday, February 28, 2020
Blogging note …
Debbie will e coming home tomorrow. She had a treatment today, so I'll be heading over there shortly.
Hmm …
… WMU student demands school apologize for white people singing 'negro spirituals'.
Wouldnt the flip side of the be that Jessye Norman and Leontyne Price couldn't sing Richard Strauss (which they did wondrously)?
Wouldnt the flip side of the be that Jessye Norman and Leontyne Price couldn't sing Richard Strauss (which they did wondrously)?
Receiving their due …
… The Mirror of My Heart edited by Dick Davis book review - TLS. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Translated by Dick Davis, a renowned scholar of Persian literature and a poet in his own right, The Mirror of My Heart examines the work of over eighty female Persian-language poets from the past thousand years. Most of those included are from present-day Iran, but many are from other parts of the Iranic world, such as Afghanistan and Tajikistan, as well as the “Persianate” world, as in the case of India. To add to the diversity of the selection, a number of these poets are not even of Iranic stock or native Persian speakers. In addition, some of those living are currently based outside their respective countries.
Something to think on …
The pleasantest things in the world are pleasant thoughts, and the great art of life is to have as many of them as possible.
— Michel de Montaigne, born on this date in 1533
Appreciation …
… Graced Grit: A Hymn-laced Eulogy to True Grit Author Charles Portis | Front Porch Republic. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Portis is the maker of Mattie Ross and the adventure that leads a close reader to take stock in the high cost of revenge. French philosopher René Girard makes a universal concept from such matters in his mimetic theory. As in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, most of us recognize the poignancy of a child (or parent) seeking to right the most taboo of violent acts—kin slaying. This is the theme of the first literary English language epic Beowulf, and it is the quest that Mattie is on when she picks the “meanest,” most “pitiless” marshal in Fort Smith to track her daddy’s killer. Of course we are cheering her on, just as we did that Texas father back in 2012 that killed the man he found molesting his four-year-old daughter.
Getting to know him …
… The wizard that was Warhol | The Spectator.
Gopnik’s long biography is much needed — and it’s not long enough. The text is quite a roller-coaster, as the author attempts to resolve what he sees as the artist’s contradictions, something which Warhol himself never bothered about. At his revolutionary height in the 1960s, when he ruptured art and society through the astonishing liberties taken by his paintings, films and superstars at the Silver Factory, Warhol went home at night to be looked after by his mother. Gopnik sees this as an example of Warhol’s irony, but that is wrong. It’s not his irony, it’s ours.
Taking a closer look …
…The Black Model in Western Art History - Artsy. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Olympia is, according to art history survey classes, textbooks, and museum wall labels, the painting that takes the first real step away from the academic romanticism of the early 19th century, placing the female muse in the contemporary realm of the demi-monde—the class of women who inhabited the French underworld of brothels and debauchery—and imbuing her with agency. Murrell sees something different. “There are two women in that painting, one white and one black,” she said. “Manet presented both of them to us with almost equally strong pictorial values.” To Murrell’s eye, the maid figure, while loaded with “all the issues of race and class of that period,” also gets a modernist update. In contrast with the white servant in Titian’s earlier touchstone Venus of Urbino (1538), Manet’s maid is brought forward, closer to the center of the painting. She is not the “exotic, bare-breasted Other that was the standard mode of portraying black women,” Murrell said. “She is clad in everyday attire rather than the meticulously rendered, lavish silks, and turbans, and jewelry of the imaginary Orient.”
Tyranny alert …
… China Jails Hong Kong-based Swedish Bookseller For 10 Years on Spying Charge. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Much in what he says …
… The Case for “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again” - The Atlantic. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Willful, preventable ugliness is always a problem to one degree or another. Here the ugliness involves the self-conscious repudiation of commonly accepted notions of proportion, accessibility, appropriateness, and coherence. The problem doubles when the ugliness is created by government agencies spending the public’s money while in thrall to a special interest like the architecture establishment—in this case, the architects who design the government’s buildings, the critics who praise them, the academics who try to explain them, the trade associations that drape them in awards, and the wealthy civic boosters who like showing up for the ribbon cutting. Everyone wins except for the people who have to visit, work in, pay for, and look at the result.
Hmm …
… Jordan Peterson’s perfectly Petersonian health scare - Religion News Service. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Peterson’s health problems are, of course, worthy of compassion. But Mikhaila Peterson’s story of brave Russian doctors who were willing to authorize extreme procedures that their more cautious North American colleagues purportedly would not, and her characterization of her father as suffering from physical, not psychological, dependency, is telling.
Thursday, February 27, 2020
Indeed …
… This Is A Permanent Book. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Started by Heyward and Blanche Cirker in their apartment in post-war Queens, Dover Publications produced 10,000 book titles over the course of 80 years. They built a profitable company through a number of unique and innovative publishing practices, most notably filling their catalog with republished versions of books that had fallen out of copyright.I never knew any of this, though I’ve certainly owned and Dover Books.
Something to think on …
The free exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world.
— John Steinbeck, born on this date in 1902
Wow …
…Breathtaking Winners of International Landscape Photographer of the Year. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Technical Patent Malarkey – Idlings
… Technical Patent Malarkey – Idlings. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… one of the qualifications for a career in PR is the ability to turn out reams of vaguely intelligent-sounding bullshit, and that’s where a BA in English helps. Back in college we learned to read our professors at least as well as our Shakespeare. We swallowed their special terms, pet theories, and personal predilections, and brought them back up again in novel arrangements of just-intelligible English sentences for our term papers. It worked.Well, I also managed to make a living out of my English degree, too, (though the philosophy and theology courses proved just as important), but I never had churn out gobbledegook. And my professors was mostly just good teachers. Guess times have changed.
And the nominees are …
… The 2020 James Beard Award Semifinalists | James Beard Foundation. (Hat tip, Rus. Bowden.)
Wednesday, February 26, 2020
Hmm …
… Are economists really this stupid? - UnHerd. (Hat tip, Rich Lloret.)
It would be terrifying to learn that doctors actually think that “drug trial finds positive result” means “this drug works for all patients in all circumstances”. Similarly, if K&K are right in thinking that economists and finance types need to be told that their models are not 100% precise representations of reality – if they think they never need to put a term for “maybe this model is wrong” into their model, and are just happy to bet all our money on them definitely not having forgotten to carry the 2 at some point in their big spreadsheet – then that, too, is completely terrifying. If K&K are right that this book needed to be written, then: holy shit.
And listen to some more …
… Episode 363 – Cassandra Khaw – The Virtual Memories Show.
“In novels, you’re trusting the reader to follow you along the whole way. In video games, you’re working with the idea that people’s attention spans are scattered, they’re going to approach it at different times, and maybe just walk off and explore for a while.”
Listen in …
… Episode 362 – Richard Kadrey – The Virtual Memories Show.
“I try to tell young writers, ‘Do not fetishize your world-building.’ I’ve seen writers think they have to be Tolkien, they have to invent Elvish, before they can start the first page of their book.”
Something to think on …
Logic and truth are two very different things, but they often look the same to the mind that's performing the logic.
— Theodore Sturgeon, born on this date in 1918
Tuesday, February 25, 2020
Nice to know …
… Belgian city of Aalst says anti-Semitic parade 'just fun' - BBC News.
Guess they really get off on genocide.
Something to think on …
Fumbling for a word is everybody's birthright.
— Anthony Burgess, born on this date in 1917
Unflattering insights …
… The prophetic Raymond Chandler | Spectator USA. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Raymond Chandler’s America remains recognizable, even familiar, in 2020, in nearly all ways but one: the extent to which American government has advanced from a political-financial racket to an ideological-financial one.
Hmm …
… Local author explores religion in fiction, pop culture in new book - News - New Jersey Herald - Newton, NJ. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Iconic artist Andy Warhol, he said, was one of those in pop culture not normally recognized for his roots in Catholicism. While most known for painting Campbell Soup cans and portraits of notable entertainers including Marilyn Monroe and Blondie singer Debbie Harry, Ripatrazone has additionally explored the multifaceted Warhol in his book, calling him one of art’s “finest visual prophets.” Unknown to many was Warhol’s devotion to Catholicism, he said, including quietly attending daily Mass, volunteering his time to provide food for the homeless and painting his own version of the Last Supper.
Q&A …
… Emma Copley Eisenberg on Researching and Writing The Third Rainbow Girl - Write Now Philly. (Hat tip, Dave lull.)
Opening the door to nonfiction turned out to be the way into writing this book more honestly and ethically, as you can make clear in nonfiction your own background and what you are bringing to telling a particular story. I started reading some of the coverage about the 1980 Rainbow Murders that was available online, and immediately it became clear to me that the story that existed was deeply wrong and portrayed a stereotyped image of this place I had known so well and of the kind of women who might come there as travelers. It was an impulse to contribute, to tell the story hopefully better than it had been told before. And then my own personal experiences came knocking again and began to rhyme with the things I was learning about the murders, so I decided to include some pieces of insight into the contemporary community I gained while living there as well.
Tough guy and his AI sidekick …
… THE GREAT AMERICAN DECEPTION | Kirkus Reviews.
I had the privilege of reading an early version of this book. Arjay is quite a character.
Monday, February 24, 2020
Something to think on …
First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice.
— Octavia Butler, who died on this date in 2006
Hmm …
… Don’t Talk to Strangers? These Apps Encourage It. - WSJ.
Do apps that help teens talk to strangers provide unique and meaningful benefits? And can they ensure the safety of the many children who use them?
Just so you know …
… 6 inspiring poets you should read year-round, not just during Black History Month. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Sunday, February 23, 2020
Anniversary …
… Raising the flag on Iwo Jima: Here's the story behind that iconic World War II photo | Live Science.
This was certainly, as they say, an iconic image in my childhood. There was a gigantic reproduction of it my first grade school.
Blogging note …
Blogging will be a bit spotty over the next couple of days. Debbie right now is my top priority.
Tales of odds and ends …
… Making a Home Among Monsters and Martians | The Russell Kirk Center. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… Hollars’s insistence that the strange should not be eliminated but seriously engaged with works to encourage in his readers an acceptance of mystery. John Keats’s concept of “negative capability” and Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s call to “live the questions” are both at home in Hollars’s new book. With this overview in mind, Hollars’s invitation to “wallow in the weird together” is all the more worth accepting.
A good idea …
… To Celebrate Being Alive | Chapter 16. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
These pieces truly are essays, attempts at illuminating corners that are presentably dark, particularly in our understanding of devotion and its relationship to art. He lays out his mission in the preface, writing that “poetry celebrates being alive as an act of consciousness.” He convincingly makes a case for that optimistic viewpoint in the chapters that follow.
Something to think on …
All that passes is raised to the dignity of expression; all that happens is raised to the dignity of meaning. Everything is either symbol or parable.
— Paul Claudel, who died on this date in 1955
Saturday, February 22, 2020
Holy dying …
… Sir Roger Scruton: Last days of a giant | Mark Dooley | The Critic. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
During our last weekend together, I watched in silent grief as he began to rise ‘above the wind of contingency that blows through the natural world’. In a way, he had already passed through the window of our empirical world to that ‘other sphere’ about which he had so often wrote so beautifully and persuasively. He was dying, yet he was also rising to assume the transcendental standpoint which, he believed, was the answer and the solution to every form of pseudoscience. Whether it was aiding dissidents in Communist Czechoslovakia or abandoning the academy for a life of farming and writing, Scruton had always given concrete expression to his ideals. In his own life, he had always given witness to what he believed in and resolutely fought for. And now, as he approached the end, he was showing us how to transcend suffering by finding meaning in it. ‘I not only learned things about the world, but I absorbed them to the point where they became part of who I am,’ he said. One of those things was the deep mystery at the heart of each person – the fact that we are in the world but not of it.
Not the place you may think you know …
… My Hollywood: A Triptych – Boris Dralyuk. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Anniversary and appreciation …
… The Originality of a Maverick Matchup - WSJ. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
See also: Nilsson Sings Newman.
Fifty years ago, such an album was released: “Nilsson Sings Newman,” a maverick matchup of two rising singer-songwriters. Randy Newman supplied the quirky songs and played piano, while Harry Nilsson eschewed his own gifted songwriting to sing and to arrange the background vocals. Released In February 1970, the recording is a jewel of originality, understatement and studio wizardry.
See also: Nilsson Sings Newman.
Something to think on …
There is only one trait that makes the writer. He is always watching.
— Morley Callaghan, born on this date in 1903
Reassessment …
… Reconsidering the Piano Legacy of Dave Brubeck, in a Deep Dive Centennial Special | WBGO. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Brubeck was a swing player who overlaid classical music and modern jazz onto his swing style, not a classical player who got into jazz. The critics got it exactly wrong. And because his style was well established by 1942, his swing feel was an older approach, not fully compatible with the modern bebop feel — and, one could argue, not fully compatible with his rhythm sections, which were in the modern vein (even though they were not at all in the modern vanguard).I was unaware that Brubeck has been disparaged by self-appointed jazz purists. It was certainly hip to like him if you were young in the ‘50s.
Friday, February 21, 2020
Paul Bowles
Until recently, Paul Bowles was not an author with whom I was familiar; his most celebrated novel, The Sheltering Sky, was not one I'd encountered.
I spent the last two weeks reading that book, and am not sure, ultimately, how to characterize it. The first of three parts charts the arrival of a feuding American couple in North Africa; this is followed by their separation and, later, by their violent confrontation with the Sahara, including its people and landscape.
The first section of the novel was the most effective, though the travelogue -- like the dialogue -- seemed a bit derivative. The second part, in which the couple grows apart, benefited from interesting plot sequences, and a cast of eccentric characters, but was rendered ineffective, I thought, as a result of Bowles's inability to identify what had brought the two together in the first place. The final section is the most severe, with unexpected forays into sexual violence and physical hardship. This part was -- for me, at least -- incongruous: Bowles's main female character, Kit, assumes an identity not at all in line with what's been developed before. Her transition is too rapid, and therefore less believable.
In many ways, the final section of the novel felt rushed: if Bowles sought to make a point about American women, for instance, or about the role of sexuality in human relations, he ought to have expanded that section to include more visible contrasts between American society and the scene Kit and Port, her husband, encounter in Algeria. One argument which Bowles does, however, effectively make focuses on the idea of control. At the start of the novel, everything is programmed: Kit, especially, cannot take any action which first confirming its acceptability. By the end, she's jettisoned all of this: she is beholden to no one, and seems, in a sense, to have come completely undone.
The question is why: why has this happened? Is it the desert which has done this to Kit, or is it some sort of recognition around the nature of her relationship with Port? I am not sure that Bowles himself knows the answer, and the result is a novel searching, frustratingly, for a moral.
Coming home …
… Howard Jacobson: 'Russia, My Homeland' – Tablet Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
My own contribution to the task of shaking the Urals from our shoes was preferring Tolstoy to Dostoevsky and once in a while putting in a word for Turgenev above them both. But weren’t there twinges of recognition whichever of them I read? Yes. No. Yes.
Something to think on …
Nobody is ever sent to Hell: he or she insists on going there.
— W. H. Auden, born on this date in 1907
Vintage Q&A …
… Alastair Morgan - Alastair Morgan talks to Anthony Burgess | Literary Review | Issue 056. (Ht tip, Dave Lull.)
Yes, language gets in the way, and is meant to get in the way. You’re meant to observe the structure, as well as the message the structure is trying to convey. This is, of course, analogous to music where there is no distinction between structure and content. Indeed, it is possible to regard literature of the class 2 nature, chiefly poetry, as an attempt to recall a non-existent golden age in which language was totally iconic. Of course it never was. We like to believe it was, and when Tennyson writes one of his onomatopoeic lines on the murmuring of innumerable bees and all that sort of stuff, it is an attempt to restore a golden age in which language gave you the referent as much as it possibly could.
Thursday, February 20, 2020
Good for her …
… Farmer in Eastern Washington Invites Bloomberg to Teach Her How Simple Farming Is | News and Politics.
"But rather than take offense over your comments, I’d like to offer a simple invitation- please come show me how simple farming is because evidently I have way over complicated this whole thing."
The letters are worth reading, but …
… Flannery O'Connor's Good Things | The American Conservative. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
This intrusion of politics and celebrity is the bane of contemporary life.… a serious complaint must still be registered. Open up Valdimir Nabokov’s 1962 novel Pale Fire and you will find, first, “John Shade’s” poem in four cantos of heroic couplets, followed by an extensive commentary authored by his neighbor and colleague Charles Kinbote. The commentary, however, is no such thing. What purport to be glosses on the lines of the poem turn out to be eccentric and pretentious flourishes intermingled with autobiographical indulgences such that Shade’s poem becomes little more than a coat rack from which to hang Kimbote’s crazed story.Good Things Out of Nazareth comes irritatingly close to realizing Nabokov’s playful fiction as a reality. Alexander’s commentary and footnotes are often useful but frequently divagate on such matters as the contemporary Democratic Party and Trump’s election, the poet Allen Tate’s performance in the college classroom, the “good libations” had at Notre Dame literature conferences, and even the irrelevant detail that Catholic theologian Teilhard de Chardin was mentioned at the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Page-long—and inaccurate—summaries of Orestes Brownson’s theory of territorial democracy and Russell Kirk’s description of the conservative tradition are given, simply because the two figures are mentioned for reasons unconnected to those matters. None of this belongs.
Something to think on …
Civilization exists precisely so that there may be no masses but rather men alert enough never to constitute masses.
— Georges Bernanos, born on this date in 1888
A movie for these times …
… Big Town, Big Talk: On “Motherless Brooklyn” - Los Angeles Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The “New York isn’t as good as it was in [insert lionized era here]” bitch session is a time-honored tradition. But there’s a difference between not caring for the creative class revered by a new generation and there not being that class to revere or despise at all. It’s impossible to look at New York today and imagine it being the inspiration and incubator for the disparate likes of Frank O’Hara or Rona Jaffe or Patti Smith or Barbra Streisand or the New York Dolls or the Brill Building songwriters. Nostalgia is a perilous state for the artist or the critic to take up residence in, but when a culture has reduced itself to retread and revenue, you might as well long for a past with some substance to it.
Maybe this is why the 1950s New York in director, screenwriter, and star Edward Norton’s film of Jonathan Lethem’s novel Motherless Brooklyn feels alive in a way that the real New York City no longer does.
Introducing …
… Russia’s Dr. Seuss. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Name: Kornei Chukovsky. Dates: 1882 to 1969. Number of supremo-supremo classic children’s books to his credit: ten or twelve. His stuff is a lot like Green Eggs and Ham: about that long; rhymes bouncing around like popcorn; no real point in sight. (Of course, like with everything else, you can carry whatever point you like into his books and then pretend you found it there. It’s like cops planting weed in people’s cars.)
Wednesday, February 19, 2020
Hmm …
… Rémi Brague’s bracing critique of modernity’s low-rent logos – Catholic World Report.
Brague rehabilitates the Good not as a norm but as the “infrastructure of life.” We need to know the ground of our existence, or in the manner of Plato the “creative principle,” and in the biblical sense that creation itself is goodness and that being is fundamentally good. Plato compared the Good to the sun or that which nurtured life and helped bring it into being. Cut off from the sun, man’s survival is in jeopardy. Modernity shields man from the sun by its stipulation that we don’t know if we come from a good Principle or Being that nurtures our being. Can we even make sense of the ground and content of human freedom? But what if the ancient biblical teaching is right, creation is goodness because a “generous God calls us to partake of his own loving life.” Then, Brague concludes, we have “reasons to ensure the continuance of life.” We also know the meaning of our freedom.
Blogging note …
I'm just back from a funeral, and now must head off to the hospital. Blogging must once again take a back seat.
Hmm …
… Berkeley warns students about coronavirus 'memes and GIFs' that spread 'xenophobia'.
You would think they'd be primarily concerned about the infection.
Hmm …
… Evildoers and Their Art | Peter Hitchens | First Things. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Does artistic merit cancel wickedness? Can the art be considered separately from the artist? Surely not. To appreciate the work of Rembrandt, for instance, is to see and to feel something of him, and in my case to feel a strong personal liking across the centuries. Gill was plainly capable of recognizing goodness, and was not its constant enemy, as his Stations of the Cross show. Even today some solitary pilgrim to Westminster Cathedral might be moved by them to pity, mercy, or repentance. Can artistic beauty do so much good that it simply bypasses the moral quality of the artist? Plenty of artists have lived less than saintly lives, to put it mildly. Yet at some point, their works have served the cause of goodness.
Hmm …
… Atheist Richard Dawkins Is, Sort Of, Talking Approvingly About Cannibalism, Again – HillFaith.
As Chesterton said, “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”
Not sure why the author of this piece thinks Dawkins is one of the smartest people in the world. Just what notable bench science has he done? As for The God Delusion, no one in his right mind believes in the God Richard Dawkins doesn't believe in.
As Chesterton said, “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”
Not sure why the author of this piece thinks Dawkins is one of the smartest people in the world. Just what notable bench science has he done? As for The God Delusion, no one in his right mind believes in the God Richard Dawkins doesn't believe in.
Something to think on …
There is only one history of any importance, and it is the history of what you once believed in, and the history of what you came to believe in.
— Kay Boyle, born on this date in 1902
Tuesday, February 18, 2020
Vintage commentary …
… Christopher Hitchens on New York City's Petty Policies | Vanity Fair.
So there are laws that are defensible but unenforceable, and there are laws impossible to infringe. But in the New York of Mayor Bloomberg, there are laws that are not possible to obey, and that nobody can respect, and that are enforced by arbitrary power. The essence of tyranny is not iron law. It is capricious law. Tyranny can be petty. And “petty” is not just Bloomberg’s middle name. It is his name.
Unelected bureaucracy strikes again …
… The slow death of French cheese - UnHerd. (Hat tip, Rich Llorett.)
Surely, this is cause for Frexit.
“I get up at 5am. I collect the milk myself from the farms in the village. I warm the milk,” Mr Michelin told me. “I scoop it carefully into cylinders. I pay attention to the varying consistency and taste of the curd. It alters subtly with the seasons, depending on the qualities of the grass. I mold the cheeses by hand. Every cheese is a little different.”
“That’s what gets me into trouble these days,” M. Michelin said. “Brussels and Paris say that the cheeses must all be the same. There seem to be new rules every month. How can I carry on if all my cheeses have to be identical?”
Surely, this is cause for Frexit.
Tonight …
A TRIBUTE TO JAMES TATE &
RUSSELL EDSON, WITH BEER
PRESENTED BY:
POETRY IN COMMON
&
THE GREEN LINE CAFÉ POETRY SERIES
&
100 THOUSAND POETS FOR
PEACE AND CHANGE
Tuesday, February 18, 2020, 6-7:30 PM
Give Yourself A Break!
WITH READINGS BY DREW MILLER &
LEONARD GONTAREK, WITH
SPECIAL GUESTS & BEER
THE GREEN LINE CAFE IS LOCATED
AT 45TH & LOCUST STREETS
PHILADELPHIA, PA USA
(Please note the address, there are
other Green Line Café locations.)
greenlinecafe.com
gontarek9@earthlink.net
This Event Is Free
RUSSELL EDSON, WITH BEER
PRESENTED BY:
POETRY IN COMMON
&
THE GREEN LINE CAFÉ POETRY SERIES
&
100 THOUSAND POETS FOR
PEACE AND CHANGE
Tuesday, February 18, 2020, 6-7:30 PM
Give Yourself A Break!
WITH READINGS BY DREW MILLER &
LEONARD GONTAREK, WITH
SPECIAL GUESTS & BEER
THE GREEN LINE CAFE IS LOCATED
AT 45TH & LOCUST STREETS
PHILADELPHIA, PA USA
(Please note the address, there are
other Green Line Café locations.)
greenlinecafe.com
gontarek9@earthlink.net
This Event Is Free
Q&A …
… Stephen McCauley on What Makes a Comic Novel | Public Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Obviously, we’re talking in gross generalizations here. But I think that one of the reasons comic novels can be so delightfully subversive is that they can skirt around the idea of moral improvement.
Update and more …
… “No matter what happens tomorrow” | About Last Night. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… we got a Big Call last Thursday morning, our first one since August. Alas, it was a dry run—the donor lungs didn’t pan out—but it did serve as a welcome reminder that Mrs. T is still at the top of the transplant list. May another donor offer come soon, this one with a happier ending.
Read the whole thing.
Something to think on …
Art was as much in the activity as in the results. Works of art were not just the finished product, but the thought, the action, the process that created them.
— Jean M. Auel, born on this date in 1936
Monday, February 17, 2020
Let's not keep forgetting
… ‘Wilmington’s Lie’: This little-known 1898 coup in North Carolina had an ugly legacy | Book review.
The final third gauges the aftershocks. The Wilmington overthrow did not cause the triumph of white supremacy in the South, but it did help it spread. The first Jim Crow law passed in 1899, and the Democrats took the state in 1900, unleashing a flood of segregationist legislation to solidify white domination.I'm so old I remember when the Democratic Party was the party of segregation. (Robert Byrd filibustered the 1964 Civil Rights bill).
A review of Nige’s book …
… PressReader.com - The Golden Age of English Church Monuments.(Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Something to think on …
A life is measured by how it is lived for the sake of heaven.
— Chaim Potok, born on this date in 1929
Well, maybe…
… Oscars best original song winners – ranked! | Culture | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Best to look up the entire list. Some pretty good songs didn’t make this selection.
In memoriam …
… The way we read now | Spectator USA. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The sad truth is that the novel now doesn’t occupy the same cultural high ground, and it doesn’t typically feel to readers like a practical device for addressing problems. The decline of the novel’s prestige reflects a new crisis born of our culture’s increasing failure of intellectual nerve and its terminal doubt about its own progress.
RIP …
… Elizabeth Cullinan, Writer With an Eye for Detail, Dies at 86 - NEWSRUST. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Sunday, February 16, 2020
Amazing …
Proof you can become a billionaire while remaining a complete fucking idiot. This this asshole has ever gardened?
(6) Cam Edwards on Twitter: "Mike Bloomberg’s contempt for rural America is real. https://t.co/j42L7N5lMB" / Twitter
(6) Cam Edwards on Twitter: "Mike Bloomberg’s contempt for rural America is real. https://t.co/j42L7N5lMB" / Twitter
Appreciation …
… A Bellow from France - Commentary. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I've read three of his novels — The Elementary Particles, Submission, and The Map and the Territory (which I reviewed). I think he's a must-read. (I have Serotonin, but haven't got around to reading it yet.) Odd that this article doesn't that he his pen name is the maiden name of the grandmother who raised him. His birth name is Michel Thomas. Here is my review of The Map and the Territory.
Among the previous generation of American novelists, the sensibility closest to Houellebecq’s is Saul Bellow’s—passionately engaged but authoritative and judgmental, an essayist’s sensibility as much as a novelist’s. If his characters frequently hold crackpot opinions, jthat never make his novels feel like crackpot projects. Houellebecq, educated at the elite National Agronomic Institute, has a mastery of, and a curiosity about, the facts of science. He delights in them. There is a fussy statisticality about his writing: “The year 1970 saw a rapid growth in erotic consumption, despite the efforts of a still-vigilant sexual repression…. Naked breasts spread rapidly on the beaches of Southern France. In the space of a few months, the number of sex shops in Paris rose from 3 to 45.”
I've read three of his novels — The Elementary Particles, Submission, and The Map and the Territory (which I reviewed). I think he's a must-read. (I have Serotonin, but haven't got around to reading it yet.) Odd that this article doesn't that he his pen name is the maiden name of the grandmother who raised him. His birth name is Michel Thomas. Here is my review of The Map and the Territory.
Death and horses …
… Just Dying for It: On Tolstoy’s “Lives and Deaths: Essential Stories” - Los Angeles Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
There are only four tales in this concise, beautiful little volume, and there could be several other Tolstoy collections with the same title that would contain none of these.
Hmm …
… How Are Your Telomeres Today? Can Faith Actually Help You Live Longer, Healthier? – HillFaith.
“Adults who frequently attend religious services, pray with regularity, and consider themselves to be religious tend to exhibit longer telomeres than those who attend and pray less frequently and do not consider themselves to be religious.”
The authors of the study believe theirs was the first comprehensive data-driven analysis of the relationship between religious practice and telomere length. And, being the first such analysis, the authors also acknowledged that their findings aren’t definitive and more study is needed.
Something to think on …
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
— Henry Adams, born on this date in 1838
Saturday, February 15, 2020
The flow of being …
… First Known When Lost: River.
Walter Pater wrote one of the finest essays on Wordsworth. Among many other perceptive observations, he notes: "And the mixture in his work, as it actually stands, is so perplexed, that one fears to miss the least promising composition even, lest some precious morsel should be lying hidden within -- the few perfect lines, the phrase, the single word perhaps, to which he often works up mechanically through a poem, almost the whole of which may be tame enough."
Just so you know …
… Global CO2 emissions in 2019 – Analysis - IEA.
The United States saw the largest decline in energy-related CO2 emissions in 2019 on a country basis – a fall of 140 Mt, or 2.9%, to 4.8 Gt. US emissions are now down almost 1 Gt from their peak in the year 2000, the largest absolute decline by any country over that period.
Parsing the Pope …
… Pope Francis's dream.
…The Day Nothing Happened - The Catholic Thing.
(Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
See also: Analysis: ‘Querida Amazonia’ and the German synod.
…The Day Nothing Happened - The Catholic Thing.
(Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
See also: Analysis: ‘Querida Amazonia’ and the German synod.
Something to think on …
Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.
— Alfred North Whitehead, born on this date in 1861
Sounds like a good idea …
… The best way to start your day: Read a poem — Quartz at Work. (Hat tip, Tim Davis.)
As the former director of Correymeela, a thriving charity in Northern Ireland, Ó Tuama experienced how starting each day with poetry can infuse a kind of lyricism to the most quotidian managerial tasks. “I spent an hour and a half looking at the mystery of language and that has actually really helped me,” he says.
Where we find ourselves …
… Ross Douthat’s New Book Examines Our Cultural Disaffection as a Problem of Absence. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)We are, Douthat tells us, exhausted. We make the same movies, over and over (most involving Marvel superheroes or galaxies far, far away). Our young turn away from actual sex and toward the consolations of pornography: sex without human relationship, and therefore without consequence and contingency. We approach “politics the way [we] approach a first-person shooter game—as a kind of sport, a kick to the body chemistry, that doesn’t actually put anything in [our] relatively comfortable late-modern lives at risk.” As Walter Benjamin famously predicted as early as 1939, we aestheticize through alienation, and alienate through aestheticization: living our lives in second order.
Friday, February 14, 2020
Further blogging note …
Did all my chores today. But did not sleep well last night. Just woke up from a long nap. And I’m still tired. Blogging will resume tomorrow.
No blogging until later …
I have to be over the hospital shortly, so I won't be able to do any blogging until whenever I get home.
Something to think on …
Always get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start.
— P. G. Wodehouse, who died on this date in 1975
Thursday, February 13, 2020
Hmm …
… The Lord Gave Me a Word for 2020 | Anne Kennedy. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Most of us are mediocre. We just get up in the morning and go to work, over and over again. Our children grow up and leave home and we keep getting out of bed and doing whatever’s in front of us until we can’t get out of bed anymore. While we’re doing that, the body slowly breaks apart. The mind and spirit don’t get stronger, if anything they get weaker—knowledge isn’t power, it is sorrow. The more you know other people, the more you grieve for them. The more you know yourself, the more you know that you are actually decreasing, and Christ is increasing, as he should.
Something to think on …
If your vision of the world is of a certain kind you will put poetry in everything, necessarily.
— Georges Simenon, born on this date in 1903
Time to get moving again …
… Back to the Future by Peter Thiel | Articles | First Things. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Are we making progress? Not so much, Douthat answers. Baby boomers will wince at his title, since “decadence” sounds to them like the complaint of an old curmudgeon. They cannot stand to think of themselves as old, nor can they bear to think of the society they dominate as dysfunctional. But this is a young man’s book. Douthat can see our sclerotic institutions clearly because his vision is not distorted by out-of-date memories from a more functional era.
Just so you know …
… Prince Harry’s Employment Prospects in Canada (Worst-Case Scenario) | The Nation. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Wednesday, February 12, 2020
Something to think on …
The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness.
— Muriel Rukeyser, who died on this date in 1980
Quite a group …
… Flannery O‘Connor and Friends, Revisited | George Weigel | First Things. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Above all, Good Things Out of Nazareth—Gordon’s biblical metaphor for the Southern literary renaissance, which Dr. Alexander adopts for his title—is a powerful reminder of the intensity of Flannery O’Connor’s Catholic faith: an intensity that was unmarked by sentimentality, that was informed by an astonishingly broad reading in the Fathers of the Church and St. Thomas Aquinas, and that sustained her through many dark nights of the soul, both literary and physical. At the end, that is the deepest impression her letters leave: Here is a woman of extraordinary courage whose configuration of her life to the Cross was a source of both personal strength and literary genius.
Listen in …
… Episode 361 – Dmitry Samarov – The Virtual Memories Show.
“I’ve been very fortunate to have an undying inner need to keep expressing myself, in the face of fairly universal indifference. It just doesn’t discourage me; it might be some sort of insanity.”
And the winners are …
… The 25th Annual Photo Contest Winners - Lake Superior Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Tuesday, February 11, 2020
Blogging note …
I have things to do around the house, then have to take off to visit Debbie. I’ve done some blogging and will do more later.
And some people are rejoicing …
… Jordan Peterson Is Sick | The American Conservative.
So if you’re looking for demons, which fits the role more perfectly: the troubled academic who took medication to deal with his wife’s cancer and the strains of life in the public spotlight — or the social-justice hashtag sadists who revel in his misery?The latter are simply despicable, and deserve to be shunned.
Exemplary …
… Meet Titania McGrath, the Wokest SJW on Twitter – Reason.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Based in London, McGrath burst onto social media in 2018 and describes herself as a "radical intersectionalist poet committed to feminism, social justice and armed peaceful protest." She identifies as "non-binary," "polyracial," and ecosexual" and claims to"teabag the foes of justice with a gender-neutral scrotum." She is the author of the new book Woke: A Guide to Social Justice, which is climbing the charts in both the United Kingdom and the United States.