Friday, July 31, 2020

RIP …

… Alan Parker Dead: 'Fame', 'Midnight Express,' 'Mississippi Burning' Director Was 76 | Hollywood Reporter.

Walking a tightrope …

… Travels in the Library: Challenging a journalist’s moral principles.

A most interesting survey …

… How do you read? A bookish meme | Reading Freely.

The weapons of the spirit …

Malcolm Gladwell: How I Rediscovered Faith. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I have always been someone attracted to the quantifiable and the physical. I hate to admit it. But I don’t think I would have been able to do what the Huguenots did in Le Chambon. I would have counted up the number of soldiers and guns on each side and concluded it was too dangerous. I have always believed in God. I have grasped the logic of Christian faith. What I have had a hard time seeing is God’s power.

Good to learn …

… Lessons From Ronald Knox | Sohrab Ahmari | First Things. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… as I spent the summer days with Waugh’s biography, I felt constantly as if Knox was inviting me to lift myself up to the level of his natural virtues—and as if he was somehow dispensing his supernatural gifts from Waugh’s pages into my mind and soul. Such a man was Knox; such a biographer, Waugh.

Neither surprising nor encouraging …

… Extra: Newspapers are dead, just 3% get political news from them.

Pew’s study found that those who use print, radio, or a news website have a “high” to “middle” knowledge of political news. But 57% who get their information on social websites have “low political knowledge.”

Phony Catholic college does its thing …

… Loyola University Maryland removes Flannery O'Connor's name from hall | National Catholic Reporter.

Pushing back …

… Some students are daring to stand up to cancel culture.
Among the demands were reparations, “anti-racist training,” more classes focused on “race, identity, and power” and that the university “cut ties” with the “prison-industrial complex.”
But POCC argued that “requiring that a mandatory, one-sided core curriculum be instituted to further reinforce pre-existing ideological commitments is antithetical to the fundamental mission of a university and a liberal arts education,” and that “the vast majority of claims and demands made by these students amounts to a concerted siege of free thought at Princeton.”

Miss Emily’s friend …

… Morning’s Canvas: Colonel Higginson’s funeral — 12 May 1911.

Midlife crisis …

 How to cope with middle age - Google has outgrown its corporate culture | Leaders | The Economist.

To be both innovative and mature is a hard trick to pull off. History is littered with failed attempts. In giving it a go, the firm has to decide whom it puts its faith in: managers, investors or geeks?

Good for them …

… Thousands of Christians show up for beach services, worship indoors.



I hope more and more people start standing up to these would-be dictators, like Pa.'s Gov. Wolf, who is responsible for thousands of deaths. 

Slow and steady and looking for love …

… Missing for a month, tortoise finds his way back to Duluth family | Duluth News Tribune. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Something to think on …

Modern man is a hard driven nomad without any stability, not (as the Bible has it) a wanderer or a pilgrim, but a refugee-an escapist. Instead of meditation and reflection there is only speed, fear and “distraction.”
— Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, born on this date in 1909

Clearing the record …

… Trader Joe’s Mans the Ramparts After All | Power Line.

Miss Emily and adventures at home …

… Morning’s Canvas: The Goblin Bee – That will not state – its sting.

Thursday, July 30, 2020

Survival …

… In 'Memorial Drive,' A Daughter Unearths And Remembers Trauma : NPR. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

The memoir, out this week, is a meditation on Trethewey's own life as well as those of her mother and grandmother — an interrogation of the self and of family history haunted, in large part, by the abuse Trethewey and her mother both suffered at the hands of her stepfather. It ended, ultimately, in the murder of Trethewey's mother by her step-father when Trethewey was 19.

And the winner is …

… ‘Utterly joyful’ Look Up! wins Waterstones children's book of the year | Children and teenagers | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

A pair of poems …

… Velux 1 and Velux 2. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

Clearing the record …

… Flannery O’Connor Was Not a Racist - The Catholic Thing. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… this is the woman who wrote a story poignantly revealing the suffering of black people in the South. This is the woman whose spiritual director was a Jesuit priest, James McCown, who was known as a strong proponent of integration. And this is also the woman who said, after an upsetting experience involving a bus driver’s cruel remark toward black passengers, “I became an integrationist.”

Which some of us enjoy …

… A Handful of Offense | The Evelyn Waugh Society. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)



Here's a simple solution: Don't read the books. True, you will never know from your own experience that the objections are sound or not. But so what? Better that you ban yourself from reading certain things than that everyone be banned from reading them.

Anniversary …

… Morning’s Canvas: A different 1619 project.

And so …

… Daily chart - Americans are getting more nervous about what they say in public | Graphic detail | The Economist. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)



Happily, I'm not one of them.

FYI …

… Orthodox Privilege. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… at every point in history, there were true things that would get you in terrible trouble to say. Is ours the first where this isn't so? What an amazing coincidence that would be.

More on this nonsense …

… Cancelling Flannery O'Connor | The American Conservative. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

You might find this hard to believe, but once upon a time, the Jesuits had a reputation for being the most intellectual of the Catholic Church’s orders.
Well, take a look at Loyola University Maryland's home page. Not a lot there about Catholicism. In fact, the Church should think of cancelling Loyola University Maryland. Why any parent, let alone a Catholic parent, would send their kid to this bien pensant factory is beyond me.

Something to think on …

The past is the source of poetry; the future is the arsenal of rhetoric.
— Don Colacho

Wednesday, July 29, 2020

Something more than a neglected house …

… Morning’s Canvas: Do their problems have spectral origins? Hmm....

Someone should alert the bishops …

Local Church Tries Innovative Growth Strategy Of Being Open On Sundays | The Babylon Bee.

God help us …

… because we sure in hell count on the clergy: Don’t Cancel Flannery O’Connor | Jennifer A. Frey | First Things. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The student-led petition at Loyola presents an opportunity for us to consider what sort of values a Catholic institution of higher education ought to instill in its students; this is a good thing. It is an opportunity for Loyola’s Catholic leadership to acknowledge and reaffirm the truth that we humans are a fallen lot—that good and evil inevitably run through all of our hearts; to reaffirm the need for our culture to be elevated by grace; to remind young people that our quest for justice must be tempered by mercy and humility; and to explain, in Christian charity, what in O’Connor’s life and art is truly honorable and what is not.
Given that so many of the Church’s pusillanimous bishops kept the faithful from participating in the miracle of the Eucharist for so many weeks, it seems fair to wonder if they really believe in that miracle.
I am Jesuit-trained, but a good many Jesuit schools today seem more concerned with being in step with intellectual fashion than with matters eternal. My faith in the institutional church is challenged regularly by those who have somehow managed to be put in charge of it.
The Loyola studes might want to read O’Connor before passing judgment on her. They might remind themselves of something Jesus — whom they presumably worship — said:
Do not judge others, or you yourselves will be judged. As you have judged, so you will be judged, by the same rule; award shall be made you as you have made award, in the same measure. How is it that thou canst see the speck of dust which is in thy brother’s eye, and art not aware of the beam which is in thy own? (Knox Version)

Houllebecq and the diagnosis of our malaise …

… The Tattered Contract: A Kirkian Look at Michel Houellebecq - Intercollegiate Studies Institute: Think. Live Free. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Intriguingly, in his study Without God: Michel Houellebecq and Materialist Horror (2016), Louis Betty demonstrates that despite initial perceptions, Houellebecq “is a deeply and unavoidably religious writer” who lays much of the blame for modern malaise at the foot of humankind’s oldest enemy: idolatry in the form of materialism and its discontents. The novelist perceives the unfettered free market as a forum that provides much good, much comfort, and much luxury at a cost: a devil’s bargain that produces a desire to acquire ever more of the same, which diminishes man’s capacity for fellowship and community while destroying his sense of the sacred. It’s as J. R. R. Tolkien once wrote to his eldest son: “Commercialism is a swine at heart.” The preoccupation with mere getting and spending is both a symptom of cultural decay and a destroyer of imagination. Tolkien foresaw what Houellebecq depicts: the end of Christendom—Christian Europe—amid a self-induced postwar fever of hedonism, aimlessness, and nihilism. “More and more now, I have doubts about the sort of world we’re creating,” confides one of Houellebecq’s characters, in Platform.
The Meaning of Houellebecq. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

 The character who engages in a sociological soliloquy is perhaps Houellebecq’s key narrative innovation, and it is as essential to his art, as, say the wild vista was to Wordworth’s. But how different it is from the interior conversations conducted in Shakespeare or in the masterworks of the nineteenth century. Let the following passage serve as a representative sample of Houellecbq’s sociological soliloquy. François, the Parisian protagonist and narrator of Submission, tries to make sense of his pain as a series of girlfriends leave him:
The way things were supposed to work (and I have no reason to think much has changed), young people, after a brief period of sexual vagabondage in their very early teens, were expected to settle down in exclusive, strictly monogamous relationships involving activities (outings, weekends, holidays) that were not only sexual, but social. At the same time, there was nothing final about these relationships. Instead they were thought of as apprenticeships—in a sense, as internships

Hmm …

… A Documentary’s Attempt to Protect Flannery O’Connor at All Costs. (Hat tip, Tim Davis.)

The new documentary Flannery is the cinematic equivalent of a full-court press on Flannery O’Connor‘s behalf, to protect her place in the pantheon of great American writers from the charge that she was a racist. Unfortunately, evidence gleaned from other sources, such as Paul Elie’s recent article for The New Yorker, demonstrate that she certainly was.
 The writer should read this piece by Amy Alznauer. An excerpt:

I read Elie’s piece with my mouth falling open, more incredulous as I read. Not because I was shocked to discover that O’Connor made blatantly racist remarks throughout her life. That has been known by anyone who has cared to look ever since the 1970s. What surprised me was his minimization or omission of so many of the people who have written on O’Connor and race. He claims that the reluctance to face these facts keeps us from “approaching her with the seriousness a great writer deserves,” implying that no serious engagement has yet happened. Maybe it shouldn’t surprise me that much of the work he misreads or flat-out ignores has largely been done by women and Black Americans.

Interesting times …

… How Ayn Rand's Dystopian Novella Anticipated Cancel Culture - Foundation for Economic Education. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Anthem anticipates F. A. Hayek’s later warnings about “our poisoned language.” In The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism Hayek observes, “so long as we speak in language based in erroneous theory, we generate and perpetuate error.”
That error is evident in the use of words to convey entire moral arguments. In Anthem, “we” and “the collective” are “good,” just as, Hayek observed, “social” now designates what is “morally right.” And “what at first seems a description imperceptibly turns into a prescription”: distributive justice.
A similar shift is now occurring in the use of “equity.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest recorded instance was from 1315, from which point “equity” has been used to mean “the quality of being equal or fair; fairness, impartiality, even-handed dealing.”
Now “equity” means the moral imperative to ensure equal outcomes, as in the concept of “educational equity”: “Equity recognizes that some are at a larger disadvantage than others and aims at compensating for these people’s misfortunes and disabilities.”

Something to think on …

I don't know Who, or what, put the question, I don't know when it was put. I don't even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone, or Something,and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.
— Dag Hammarskjöld, born on this date in 1905

Listen in …

… Episode 386 – Judy Gold – The Virtual Memories Show.

“Don’t tell me what I’m allowed to talk about. There’s no growth without discourse. When you start shutting people up, that’s the end of evolution.”

Tuesday, July 28, 2020

And our own dilemmas …

… Donnafugata Dilemmas | Commonweal Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)



Beyond the romantic story of when and how it was published, the novel’s appeal could be attributed to its beautiful prose (obvious even in translation), to its languid pacing, and to how it unfolds the many layers of intrigue and fidelity within a family and between a family and the people around them. But it’s this moment—the beginning of the Prince’s decline, and its rationales and causes—that makes The Leopardmore than just another underappreciated classic. It’s this moment that makes it speak to the kinds of concerns we each have to deal with these days in our personal, professional, and faith lives.

In case you wondered …

… Socialism's evolved relationship with religion - The Christian Post.

In case you wondered …

… Bruce Charlton's Notions: Why are modern men so lacking in courage?



To be obedient and loyal to any modern group (institution, corporation, church etc.) is expedient, and to lack courage: to be on-the-side-of evil.
Courage must therefore be individual, goes unrewarded (or is often punished) by society and social institutions; and the needful courage is cold rather than hot.
(Hot courage is short-term, unthinking and in the heat of the moment. But cold courage is considered, long-termist and must strive-against against the continual pressure of unrelenting opposed expediency.)

Watch and listen …

… William Blake: Imagination and Spiritual Sight – Mark Vernon.

Anniversary …

… Morning’s Canvas: Soul, self; come poor Jackself ...

Playing to the gallery …

… The Great Corona Con: Exposing Journalistic Malpractice - LewRockwell. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

What we are looking at here is nothing other than a gross case of journalistic malfeasance whereby mainstream journalists simply refuse to report the truth about the situation. Whenever there is bad news they eagerly amplify and exaggerate while completely ignoring any positive news or developments. To be sure, the shrewd consumer of the news should always be prepared to make allowances for bias and misrepresentation, but the level of cynicism and conniving in this instance is truly remarkable.
I think they’re giving a good number of people exactly what they want.

Ignoramus alert …

… Canadian CEO Drops 'Chief' From Her Title, Says It's Racist.

Well, now she’s offending French Canadians. The word chief is Old French, meaning  principal, first. Its modern counterpart is chef.

Lovely …

… “Blood Culture,” by Leonard Cohen and Judith Fitzgerald | The Typescript. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Something to think on …

The only way to test a hypothesis is to look for all the information that disagrees with it.
— Karl Popper, born on this date in 1902

Monday, July 27, 2020

Ah, yes …

… Four Months of Unprecedented Government Malfeasance - Imprimis. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)


By now it is impossible to attribute the media’s failure to publicize the facts about the coronavirus to mere oversight.
Every story that does not mention, preferably at the top, the vast overrepresentation of nursing home deaths in the coronavirus death count—above 50 percent in many countries and 80 percent in several of our states—is a story that is deliberately concealing the truth. Casual readers and viewers have been left with the false impression that everyone is equally at risk, and thus that draconian measures are justified.
The media have been equally uninterested in the scientific evidence regarding outdoor transmission. Coronavirus infections require what Japan calls the three Cs: confined spaces, crowded places, and close contact. The fleeting encounters on sidewalks and public parks that characterize much of city life simply do not result in transmission.
The public health establishment has been equally complicitous in creating this widespread ignorance. It has failed to stress at every opportunity that for the vast majority of the public, the coronavirus is at most an inconvenience. The public health experts did not disclose that outdoors was the safest place to be and that people should get out of their homes and into the fresh air.
Maybe that’s why I haven’t got it. I have continued to walk about maskless (I wear one I enter a store, which I think is wise). Of course, I’ve also never had the flu. And lots of walking is good for your health.

A second debut, as it were …

… Expanding the scope of the poem – Catholic World Report. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Hmm …

… Harper's Letter: The Left Attacks Defense of Free Inquiry & Debate | National Review. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

 One could not avoid noticing that in addition to the specific objections to the Harper’s letter, its critics were animated by an unusually strong, almost personal, animus to the letter-writers. They constantly brought up the fact that they were wealthy, popular, liberal, and non-minority — even when they weren’t. Much of it was ideological hostility, of course, but it seemed also to be allied to a kind of class hatred, and perhaps to a sense of inferiority of some kind too. There’s a long and impressive tradition of rhetorical viciousness on the Left; Marx himself had a real talent for invective, and Brecht too. And eventually I thought I sensed what they were saying behind the formal arguments:

The more talented they are, the more they deserve to be silenced.

A boxer's adventures …

… Morning’s Canvas: This is it for me ... I’m through.

Something to think on …

It has been discovered that with a dull urban population, all formed under a mechanical system of State education, a suggestion or command, however senseless and unreasoned, will be obeyed if it be sufficiently repeated.
— Hilaire Belloc, born on this date in 1870

Sunday, July 26, 2020

The world around us …

… The Power Has Flowed Away | The Russell Kirk Center. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The horror with Houellebecq’s work is that it’s not hard to see ourselves in his protagonists. They seem contemptible and rash—the children of hippies in Atomised, the French elites who sell out to Salafism in Submission—but he shows you how you, too, through a series of small concessions by small concessions, could join their ranks. It’s no different in Serotonin. The free-trade ideologues promised us a trade we couldn’t refuse. They promised us wealth beyond our wildest imaginations. They promised us opportunities that you couldn’t even conceive of now. They showed us all their economic models and assured us that free trade will eliminate “deadweight loss” and that if you opposed it, you’d just have to look at the models again. All we would have to do is trade our local goods for imported goods. What’s the difference between French and Brazilian milk, anyway, especially if the Brazilian milk is cheaper?

Good for them …

… John MacArthur's Calif. Church Will Defy Newsom's Church Ban: 'Christ, not Caesar, Is Head of the Church'.

I hope someone forwards this to Philadelphia’s Archbishop Perez.

RIP …

… Gone With the Wind star Olivia de Havilland dies at 104 | EW.com.

Anniversary …

… Morning’s Canvas: The Cold War gets codified on this day in 1947.

Q&A …

… Kay Ryan — The Art if Poetry No. 94. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I spend vastly more time away from my desk. I’ve spent maybe one hundredth of my time writing. It seems like many people think that if you drive yourself crazy, then you can write. I’m absolutely not interested in that. It made sense to me to be as whole and well as I could be, and as happy. I wanted to see what a fortunate life would produce. What writing would come out of a mind that didn’t try to torment itself? What did I have to know? What did I have to do rather than what can I torment and bend myself into doing? What was the fruit on that tree? I’ve had a terrifically fortunate life. Which is not to say I’m talking nothing but sunshine. A certain kind of perhaps rather unwholesome-looking distortion or lopsidedness is necessary to the writer’s mind, but I never wanted to add to the grief of being human, the burden of it, or have my work do that. I never wanted to make things harder for people, or to make them feel more weighed down or guilty.

Religion, sort of …

… Everyone Worships | The Russell Kirk Center. (Hat tip Dave Lull.)

I don’t know Burton personally, but I think we have some friends in common and travel in similar circles. We both have advanced Oxbridge degrees. It just so happens that the topics Burton discusses are the topics that upper middle class people with degrees from selective colleges participate in. They are also the things that Vox readers find interesting. This is all to say that Strange Rites is pitched to an audience of a particular social class. It would be helpful, though, if she were upfront about that. Burton’s book would have been stronger if she had noted how all these movements had a particular post-Christian stance. She does offer a brief history of what she calls “intuitional” religion in chapter two, but the movements she describes make much more sense in terms of reactions against Christianity. The strange rites in the book are strange rites that come from the backdrop of middle-class white Christianity in the United States.

Clearing the record …

… An untrue claim in the New Yorker speaks volumes - The Post.

Something to think on …

Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.
— Carl Jung, born on this date in 1875

Bravo …

… The Wall Street Journal hits back at staff's 'cancel culture' | The Spectator.

Saturday, July 25, 2020

Appreciation …

… Cormac McCarthy, brutal but brilliant | Spectator USA. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

McCarthy has been faulted for the apparent relish with which he describes the cruelest actions: the casual shooting of the dancing bear in Blood Meridian, for instance. At other moments in his stories, casual suffering is merely poignant, like that of the small bird impaled alive and fluttering upon a cactus spine in Pretty Horses. Yet in his relentless insistence upon cruelty and violence, Cormac McCarthy is perhaps making a subtle aesthetic — even a moral — point. 
What about old-fashioned sensationalism? I’ve only read one of his novels, The Road, which I thought was awful: Slogging through best-sellerdom.

Angle shots …

… Zealotry of Guerin: The Night Cafe (Van Gogh), Sonnets #521 and #522.

Speaking of not being all of a piece …

… What Auden believed by David Yezzi | The New Criterion. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The moral compass of Christianity provided Auden with something more than a mere interesting poetic possibility; his Christian beliefs were in fact “true” for Auden, though he retained a deep-seated modesty about them. As Auden observed in a sermon delivered at Westminster Abbey, where he is now honored in Poets’ Corner, “Those of us who have the nerve to call ourselves Christians will do well to be extremely reticent on this subject. Indeed, it is almost the definition of a Christian that he is somebody who knows he isn’t one, either in faith or morals.”

A most imperfect apologist …

….   Hilaire Belloc – a cautionary tale. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The book that expounds his political outlook most succinctly is The Servile State (1912), an application of the principles of Leo XIII and Cardinal Manning, which foretold the world scene of the 1920s and 1930s with remarkable insight. Faced by the instability of the capitalist system and the social injustices it inevitably produced, he foresaw only three possible solutions: collectivism, the experiment that would be tried in Soviet Russia with catastrophic effect; distributism, “in which the mass of citizens should severally own the means of production”; or what he called “the servile state”, which is really what we live in today. The twentieth century saw a number of heroic attempts to put the ideas of this great book into practice. Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement in the United States springs at once to mind.
I remember seeing Belloc’s obituary in the newspaper. I was still in grade school, but if you went to a Catholic grade school, you knew of his poetry, especially the poems about Our Lady. His anti-semitism is inexcusable, of course, but as Somerset Maugham noted, men are not of a piece. The same man can in many ways quite admirable, while in others appalling. 

Indeed it is …

… Morning’s Canvas: Life is a strange and ineffable miracle.

Something to think on …

When watching men of power in action it must be always kept in mind that, whether they know it or not, their main purpose is the elimination or neutralization of the independent individual- the independent voter, consumer, worker, owner, thinker- and that every device they employ aims at turning men into a manipulable animated instrument which is Aristotle's definition of a slave.
— Eric Hoffer, born on this date in 1902

Friday, July 24, 2020

The other Fitzgerald …

… The Iceberg: A Story by Zelda Fitzgerald | The New Yorker. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)



Zelda Fitzgerald was born on this date in 1900.

We all know him …

… The Spoilsport by Robert Graves | Poetry Foundation. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)



Robert Graves was born on this date in 1895.

And the winners are …

… Winning Poems for 2020 June : IBPC.



The Judge’s Page.



(Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

Light and insight …

… Morning’s Canvas: Guided by the vital light of Dickinson’s poetry.

Karl Ove Knausgaard



Despite some of the reviews, I enjoyed Karl Ove Knausgaard's seasonal quartet. I found the writing light, but insightful. When his most recent collection was published -- this time on the art of the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch -- I was again happy to oblige. And I'm glad I did: So Much Longing in So Little Space is an excellent introduction to the life and work of this famed artist. 

Instead of summarizing Knausgaard's approach to Munch -- including his tendency toward iconography and reduction -- I wanted to focus instead on the essays, and why, taken together, they make for such a readable work of criticism. 

Knausgaard may have a healthy sense of self-regard (and his self-deprecation may sometimes feel contrived), but that does not mean that his writing and arguments suffer. In fact, it is often the opposite: in his attempts to maintain an element of intellectual modesty, Knausgaard proceeds with caution, and a decided lack of jargon. Which is not to say that his theses are pedestrian or ill-informed. Rather, they are accessible: they do not obfuscate; they do not hide behind theory. 

Knausgaard presents a measured version of Munch: part biography, part artistry. The result is a layered, but always tempered, impression of this titan of European art. Knausgaard does not kneel before Munch, but he does see him and his work anew. This is a work of criticism which moves beyond The Scream and into the lesser pieces, the sections of Munch's oeuvre which reveal as much or more about his departure from convention. 

For an approachable read on an important artistic figure, I enthusiastically recommend Knausgaard's collection.  

Pretty damn cool …

 'Are you jerking my bobber?' Lottery winner stuns friend by sharing prize | Wisconsin | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Indeed it can …

… Rhina Espaillat: "If poetry is really good, really honest, it can deal with whatever the daily crisis is" - FORMA Journal.  (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I think of a poem of my own as a familiar room with windows in it that look outside, but that also reflects me looking outside. If I manage to get the reader to join me in there, and if the poem works–that is, if it communicates and invites the reader to keep me company awhile–whatever we look at may look different to each of us, but also reflect us both, to ourselves and to each other. 

Bottoms up …

Ernest Hemingway & F. Scott Fitzgerald Drinking While Writing. (Hat tip, Tim Davis.)

… here you have two of the most successful and revered American prose writers of the 20th century with distinctly opposite views on alcohol.

Appreciation …

… Poetry’s Revival and Mr. Wilson – Catholic World Report. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

While their poetry may not land them on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, there has been a renaissance of poets whose critical intelligence and gut says that if you love verse, the one thing that you must not do is set it all free. … One of the most remarkable is James Matthew Wilson, an associate professor in the department of humanities and Augustinian traditions at Villanova University. Though he is said to belong to the “West Chester” school of formalists associated with Gioia, such inside baseball is less important than the fact that he has produced a remarkable body of both criticism and poetry.
Here is my review of Wilson’s The Hanging God:
Virtuosity and verse at the service of the imaginative vision.

Sounds right to me …

… The News Makes You Dumb - Public Discourse.

In The Theory of Education in the United States, Albert Jay Nock bemoaned “the colossal, the unconscionable, volume of garbage annually shot upon the public from the presses of the country, largely in the form of newspapers and periodicals.” His point was that a societal emphasis on literacy was by and large ineffectual if the material that most people read was stupid and unserious. Does one actually learn by reading the cant and carping insolence of the noisy commentariat?
“Surely everything depends on what he reads,” Nock said of the average person, “and upon the purpose that guides him in reading it.” What matters is not that one reads but what and how one reads.
I grew up in ‘50s, when television came into its own. I watched a lot of TV back then. Now, the only thing I watch on the tube is movies. I sure in hell don’t watch the news. I only glance over the newspaper I worked for and still, out of loyalty, subscribe to. The book I read last week — re-read actually — was short and first published in 1951: Russell Brain’s Mind, Science, and Perception.

Something to think on …

It is the loose ends with which men hang themselves.
— Zelda Fitzgerald, born on this date in 1900

Thursday, July 23, 2020

Tracking down Bond …

… Paul Davis On Crime: William Boyd: The Spies Who Lived Here: How I Found James Bond’s Precise Address.

Sad …

… Reports: “Philadelphia Free Library Director Siobhan Reardon Has Resigned Following Complaints About Workplace Racial Discrimination” | LJ infoDOCKET. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Q&A …

… Craft Corner: The Millions Interviews Christopher Beha - The Millions. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

My career as an editor has mostly reinforced for me one of the things that aspiring writers are constantly being told by workshop professors and other more established writers, which is that the real work begins once you’ve got a first draft. That recognition, in turn, has freed me up to write looser first (and second) drafts. I used to the kind of writer who really labored over sentences before I had any idea how they were fitting into a larger scheme. I still care a lot about my sentences, of course, but I’ve learned to get something down on the page first and then worry about it making it shapely or beautiful or whatever you want it to be.

Getting to know them …

… 10 Black Poets of Past and Present Who Deserve Unending Recognition for Their Work | Well Good. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

He had help …

… Morning’s Canvas: Revisiting Joe McCarthy.

Tom Wicker's Shooting Star, a superbly informative and scrupulously documented study, gives readers (in the book's 200 pages) a compact, easily accessible portrait of one of American history's most fascinating and most seriously flawed politicians. … However, as Wicker suggests in Shooting Star, perhaps McCarthy should not bear too much of the shame for the country's anti-communist hysteria; there were plenty of politicians, journalists, and citizens who supported and enabled McCarthy's inquisition; they, also, share responsibility for one of this country's most troublesome and shameful periods - an era during which paranoia, isolationism, political extremism, spurious allegations, and intolerance became acceptable. 

Seeking out the sacred …

… Familiar Voices, Sacred Stanzas | Front Porch Republic. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… the majority of poems are written in recognizable forms (there are numerous sonnets) and for the most part employ rhyme and/or meter. Even the light scattering of free verse poems throughout offer up a consistent line and a typographically predictable stanza. For this reader, this formal architecture and musical patterning signals that we are approaching poetry that occupies a ritualized, ceremonial space — a space apart from the profane and the prosaic, even as the subject matter is rooted in the earthly and the secular.

Wednesday, July 22, 2020

A prodigy …

… Four-year-old lands book deal for his 'astonishing' poetry | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

One of the great singers …


 Margaret Whiting was born on this date in 1924. This song sold a million records in 1943.

Clearing the record …

… Writer Tweets Video Of Police Brutality Implies It’s From America, But It Was From Serbia - The Lid.

A lovely tale …

… That Time I Chauffeured Jorge Luis Borges Around Scotland. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

One day Borges arrived, a frail man in his seventies, blind, and wildly talkative. He appeared to have memorized the whole of western literature, quoting vast stretches of poetry by heart. I listened to him recite bits and pieces from Anglo-Saxon poetry, Shakespeare, Milton, Chesterton, Kipling, Stevenson, and Yeats, among others. “My grandmother was English,” he told me, as if to explain his virtuosity, “and English was my first language, my first love.”

Contemporary journalism …

 An untrue claim in the New Yorker speaks volumes - The Post.

I did my best to work out a rough estimate of the true proportion of 15-34 year olds visiting the ER who had suffered legal intervention injuries, and arrived at a figure of 0.2% (you can follow my working in this thread). So I believe Lepore’s claim to be off by a factor of several hundred.
Why does this one sentence matter? Well, firstly, it misinforms readers, several of whom (based on my Twitter search for the article’s URL) also alighted on this claim, but unlike me took it on trust. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it tells us something about the political climate in a publication like the New Yorker, which was once famous for its rigorous fact checking.
Not under David Remnick  apparently.

Blogging note …

I have to leave shortly to get the SynVisc shots in my knees that are months behind thanks to the lockdown beloved of so many. I have other things to do in town after that, so blogging will not resume until much later.

Together at last …

… Morning’s Canvas: The Vulture, a Wolf and an Archbishop.

Lots and lots of insight here …

… Part of a Larger Battle: A Conversation with Thomas Chatterton Williams - Los Angeles Review of Books.

Consider that in the 1950s and ’60s, a writer like Ralph Ellison, who grew up in a tough way in Oklahoma and had to get to Tuskegee by hopping a freight train, could say that you cannot “allow the single tree of race to obscure our view of the magic forest of art.” He’s talking about segregation, and yet still he can’t reduce the purpose of his novel-writing to the question of whether he can sit at a certain café or be served at a certain lunch counter. That’s how much respect he had for art, and for the universal conception of the human condition that put him in touch with Dostoyevsky, or that made the writings of Hemingway or Thomas Mann resonate with him on a level beyond identity. And though Ellison wrote Invisible Man from an extremely black place, it reached readers all over the world, and many regarded it as the greatest American novel. He had a vision that was consistent with that which has motivated artistic production throughout Western history. He had a vision he didn’t want to diminish, not because he believed things were fine, but because he believed that the realm of art was sacred. Now, people think that’s laughable, that you’re naïve or stupid to say that the realm or art is sacred.


I just bought h1s book.

Something to think on …

Books are not men and yet they are alive. They are man's memory and his aspiration, the link between his present and his past, the tools he builds with.
— Stephen Vincent Benét, born on this date in 1898

Clearing the record …

AP Report Ignores Important Work Done by Catholic Church | RealClearReligion.
 One in six Americans admitted to a hospital, for example, is admitted to a Catholic hospital. Likewise, one of every six acute-care hospital beds is located at Catholic-owned or affiliated hospitals. Larger Catholic health systems invest significantly incharity care for the poor – eight percent of overall budget on average and as high as 19 percent in some systems – while for-profit hospitals nationwide average little more than one percent in charity care.


The AP seems to beas bad most journalism these days.

A day late …

… Morning’s Canvas: Hemingway triptych — a birth, a book, a betrayal.

Perfect for our times …

(Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Tuesday, July 21, 2020

How about that …

… The Left is Now the Right - Reporting by Matt Taibbi. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)



 If we can’t laugh at time is a white supremacist construct, what can we laugh at?


It is true that the right has had more than its share of wing nuts. But it’s also had Bill Buckley, Milton Friedman, Russell Kirk, and quite a few others.

Another college to not send your kids to…

… Rutgers English Department to deemphasize traditional grammar ‘in solidarity with Black Lives Matter’ | The College Fix. (Hat tip, Tim Davis.)

Grammar is not a matter of tradition. It’s a matter of being understood.  Try learning a foreign language without adherence to that language’s grammar. Always worthwhile, though, to familiarize yourself with dialects.

The final resting place …

… The Sincerity of a Single Fresh Flower – Quadrant Online. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

In this cemetery was a section set aside for the graves of children. There was here a little grave of a child aged two who had died nearly fifty years before. On this grave was a vase with a single fresh flower in it; and two years later, when I visited again, the vase was still there, and still with a fresh flower.
What a wealth of grief and suffering this simple sign suggested, that (I surmise) of a hopeful newlywed couple who perhaps had no further children to comfort them in what must now have been their old age! How small were my daily irritations compared with their grief! What impressed me also was the dignified lack of exhibitionism, that is to say the sincerity, of the gesture, very different from, say, the sensibility (or lack of it) shown in the immediate aftermath of Princess Diana’s death, when extremity of expression was mistaken for depth of feeling.

Expect to see more like this …

… Lockdown Deaths, Not Covid Deaths | UK Column. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), at the time of writing, with 11,841,326 supposedly confirmed cases and 544,739 alleged deaths, this is a global pandemic which has infected approximately 0.15% of the global population and has allegedly led to the deaths of 0.007%. This makes it slightly less deadly than a bad seasonal influenza which can kill 0.0085% of the world's populace in a single year.

In case you wondered …

… Why Dorothy Parker’s ashes rest at NAACP headquarters – The Forward. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Something to think on …

There are many people for whom 'thinking' necessarily means identifying with existing trends.
— Marshall McLuhan, born on this date in 1911

Monday, July 20, 2020

Bravo …

… Red Bull Just Purged High-Level Execs Who Pushed for 'Diversity and Inclusion' - Revolver.

Not only were the top two North American executives fired, but so were entire marketing teams and “culture” teams that were dedicated to pushing the lie of systemic racism.

Classically educated …

… Why Boris uses so many Latin words - Harry Mount - The Oldie. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

When describing the location of his office in City Hall – “I’m on the, er, upper epidermis of the gonad. Somewhere near the seminal vesical, I expect” – the joke depends on using the formal, scientific, Latinate terms for effect. We are more used to Anglo-Saxon terms being used for vulgarity and swear words – they become much funnier when formalised into technical, medical language.

Just so you know …

… The learning pod people are here — Joanne Jacobs.

When I saw the shift away from reopening schools — too many teachers and parents think it’s unsafe — I predicted a rise in homeschooling co-ops and private tutoring for middle-class and wealthy families. I also predicted educational disaster for the students whose “essential worker” parents are short on time, money and living space.
I suspect that  “essential worker” parents who care about their kids’ education may prove more resourceful than she thinks.

You don’t say …

… Democrats, The Party Of Science (Fiction) – Issues & Insights.

The truth about genetically modified foods is that they have likely saved billions of lives. The process, led by Norman Borlaug, the father of a genuine green revolution, has developed crops that are more nutritious and grow faster than non-genetically modified foods; are resistant to drought, disease, and pests; and produce higher yields. Democrats have screamed “danger,” yet the World Health Organization, which is philosophically in line with U.S. Democrats, and the National Academy of Sciences have said genetically modified foods are safe to consume.
The many varieties of fruits, vegetables, and flowers that Luther Burbank came up with were the product of a kind of genetic modification.

Hmm …

… He Lives: Those darn Christians and their pseudo-intellectual anti-science nonsense! (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I recently saw this from a philosopher-theologian on twitter: [3], [4] 
Tbc: I reject Darwinism totally. It is bad sc. resting on worse metaphysics. I'm tired of wild-eyed schemes for integrating it into Xian theology. We ran that experiment & it led to pantheism. [Rolls eyes] 
I replied: 
This is nonsense and a form of lying for Jesus. Darwinism (I think he means evolution) might turn out to be wrong or like most science incomplete, but it is not bad science. Human Philosophy is more of a risk to sound Christian doctrine than science.
Well,  Darwinism is the currently accepted form of evolution. There was that fellow Lamarck. And there was Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, who also advanced a notion of evolution, as did the great Augustine of Hippo, quite a few centuries earlier than any of them.  Charles Darwin’s version was on the way to being forgotten when Julian Huxley grafted Gregor Mendel’s discovery of genetics onto it, thus giving us neo-Darwinism.

But that seems to be in a bit of trouble, as indicated in David Gelernter’s Giving Up Darwin. Here is just one excerpt:

Consider the whole history of living things—the entire group of every living organism ever. It is dominated numerically by bacteria. All other organisms, from tangerine trees to coral polyps, are only a footnote. Suppose, then, that every bacterium that has ever lived contributes one mutation before its demise to the history of life. This is a generous assumption; most bacteria pass on their genetic information unchanged, unmutated. Mutations are the exception. In any case, there have evidently been, in the whole history of life, around 1040 bacteria—yielding around 1040 mutations under Axe’s assumptions. That is a very large number of chances at any game. But given that the odds each time are 1 to 1077 against, it is not large enough. The odds against blind Darwinian chance having turned up even one mutation with the potential to push evolution forward are 1040x(1/1077)—1040 tries, where your odds of success each time are 1 in 1077—which equals 1 in 1037. In practical terms, those odds are still zero. Zero odds of producing a single promising mutation in the whole history of life. Darwin loses.
Like Gelernter, I find Intelligent Design Theory wanting as a substitute for Darwin. I’ll settle for Heraclitus and the Logos or  Laozi’s Tao — a principle of intelligence inherent in being.

Here’s an idea …

… Challenge The Totalitarian Coup By Keeping All The States of Your Existence Energized and Elevated - Francis Berger.

I am ambivalent about what can be done to effectively push back against this new totalitarian world. At the same time, I am confident that the most effective push back rests in keeping our states of existence - state of mind, state of body, and state of soul - energized and elevated, especially when it appears there is nothing left to feel energized and elevated about

Hmm …

… Orthodox Privilege. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The more conventional-minded someone is, the more it seems to them that it's safe for everyone to express their opinions.

Fascinating — and lovely …

… Sing Gently – Music Catalog – Eric Whitacre. (Hat tip,Virginia Kerr.)

Academic books that are readable …

‘Beauty Is Not a Luxury’ | Commonweal Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Too often academic rigor is associated with a bloodless style and “proficiency in the use of the sacred tongue.” Too often lively writing is taken as a sign of dilettantism. Things don’t have to be this way, and Kumar, who is himself both a critic and a novelist, insists that scholarship should argue and inform but also surprise and delight.
Once upon a time there were plenty of scholarly that we literary masterpieces. To name just two: Samuel Eliot Morison’s Admiral of the Ocean Sea, which won a Pulitzer Prize and Van Wyck Brooks’s The Flowering of New England, which won both a Pulitzer and a National Book Award. Of course, the first is about that bad guy Columbus.

Anniversary and a prediction …

… Morning’s Canvas: Innocents in 1869 and an unreformed reader in 2020.

Ahem…

… We immigrants know the America-bashers are ridiculously wrong.

There’s irony in the fact that the party which considers itself “pro-immigrant” is also the one that wants to destroy our country’s rich and complicated heritage. If Democrats believe ­immigrants come to America to be anything but American, they are kidding themselves. My family and millions of others came here longing to be free, to say what we want, to worship how we want and to raise American children who will know nothing but freedom.

It certainly isn't …

… JOHN GRAY: It's not an exaggeration to compare methods of new 'woke movement' to Mao's Red Guards | Daily Mail Online.

In some ways, today’s Twitter Maoism is worse than the original Chinese version. Mao’s Cultural Revolution was unleashed by a communist dictator, who used the upheaval to consolidate his power.
Conversely, in Britain and America today, our leading institutions have shamefully surrendered their own authority to a destructive ideology.

Reading habits and gender...

...during the time of Covid

Debut …

… Ordinary Saints: a new website with poetry, painting and music | Malcolm Guite. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

 Our aim, throughout the project, was to explore what it means to be truly face to face with one another, how we might discern the image of God in our fellow human beings, and how that discernment might ready us for the time when, as we are promised, we will no longer see ‘through a glass darkly’ but really see God and one another face to face in the all-revealing, and all-healing light of Heaven.

Something to think on …

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.
— Thomas Berger, born on this date in 1924