Let us pray.
Sunday, January 31, 2021
Just to be fair …
… MDS COVID-19 Vaccine Statement for Patients.
Since, heaven forfend, I wouldn’t want to give the impression that I am unaware of the official position. Though as Carl Sagan wrote:
One of the great commandments of science is, "Mistrust arguments from authority." ... Too many such arguments have proved too painfully wrong. Authorities must prove their contentions like everybody else.
Of course, we must take Dr. Fauci at his ever-changing word.
Not what you might think …
… First Known When Lost: Significance.
Slender threads. Little things. They all add up.
Worth considering …
… How COVID-19 'Vaccines' May Destroy the Lives of Millions. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I've done some medical editing in my time (which only means I'm more or less medically literate), but it has seemed to me from the start that this vaccine has been rushed on to the market, and I have been skeptical from the start about the genetic factor. My wife has Parkinson's, so if she is urged to get the vaccine I fully intend to raise objections.
Then there's this: CDC Issues Report On Vaccine Side Effects Using Data It’s Own Website Said It Shouldn’t Use.
Something to think on …
Recipe For Greatness — To bear up under loss; To fight the bitterness of defeat and the weakness of grief; To be victor over anger; To smile when tears are close; To resist disease and evil men and base instincts; To hate hate and to love love; To go on when it would seen good to die; To look up with unquenchable faith in something ever more about to be. That is what any man can do, and be great.
— Zane Grey, born on this date in 1872
Saturday, January 30, 2021
In case you wondered …
… Why are books about books so fascinating? | The Independent. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… even a dry-seeming nonfiction category like “books about books” – a librarian might label them “studies of print culture” – can be dangerously fascinating.
Something to think on …
Solitude is the audience-chamber of God.
— Walter Savage Landor, born on this date in 1775
Friday, January 29, 2021
Distinctions …
… Celebrity, Success, and the Kingdom of Heaven - Front Porch Republic. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Most of us are, I think, called to quiet, ordinary lives of faithfulness, the successes of which are largely invisible or at least unheralded. Many of the saints give us our model for this sort of quiet faithfulness. While some of them were famous and noteworthy people in their lifetimes, the vast majority of them were total nobodies as far as their societies were concerned. We know them today because they lived according to a radically different table of values: the virtues of the Kingdom of Heaven. Even then, there are tens, even hundreds, of thousands of saints whose names we don’t know, remaining anonymous and unknown in their faithfulness. The celebrity pastor is not the model—the model is the parish priest, faithfully saying the liturgy to his congregation, day in and day out for decades, without the vast majority of us ever learning his name.
Something to think on …
A good upbringing means not that you won't spill sauce on the tablecloth, but that you won't notice it when someone else does.
— Anton Chekhov, born on this date in 1860
Thursday, January 28, 2021
Much in what he says …
… The Young Poet and the Inauguration - The Catholic Thing. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Fulton Sheen wrote God and Intelligence in Modern Philosophy (1925), not troubling to translate for his readers many a quotation from the original French or Latin. He brought that same learning and literary erudition, wearing it lightly, to his tremendously popular television show.
What happened?
A lot of things, of course, but near the top is the obvious fact that people who lead our cultural institutions do not know the arts, and do not care to learn.
Take contemporary hymns. Take them, please.
Fascinating …
… The 10 quirkiest physics stories of 2020. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
“Sag, settle, and curl” sounds like me at the end of the day.
Well, good …
… Student Activist Arrested After Reading Poem Wins Key First Amendment Victory - PEN America. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Let’s hope everyone involved remembers this when it comes to views they disagree with.
Something to think on …
A woman who thinks she is intelligent demands the same rights as man. An intelligent woman gives up.
— Colette, born on this date in 1873
Celebrity and grief …
… THE LETTERS OF ROBERT FROST, VOLUME 3 | Kirkus Reviews. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Wednesday, January 27, 2021
Explorer of darkness …
… Poet and UW professor Theodore Roethke moved among mysteries — and literary legacy. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)Roethke, who also won two National Book Awards for collections of his poems, followed that maxim about vulnerability to sometimes-extreme lengths. With his perennial subject as a writer the dark yet often exultant journey to the interior of the self, Roethke indeed moved among the most profound mysteries of human existence.
Could that be possible?
… Veteran Film Scribe Fears Dems Are Crushing Free Speech - Hollywood in Toto.
“It’s nuts,” Stone says. “I don’t see any way forward in the atmosphere we have [now]. We have to branch out, expanding our voice … it’s become too stifling.
Poet and publisher — and friends …
… Remembered Relationships: A Review of John Berryman and Robert Giroux: A Publishing Friendship - Front Porch Republic.
Samway leaves no stone unturned in providing the chronological details of the life and publication history of John Berryman. The seven chapters of the work chronicle Giroux and Berryman’s lives from childhood to Berryman’s death in 1972. During Samway’s account of their Columbia years, we receive insights into the courses they took, the grades they received, and the relationships they had with particularly influential professors, such as Mark Van Doren.
Appreciation …
… The Enduring Prose and Poetry of Clive James. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Something to think on …
To me it seems that to give happiness is a far nobler goal that to attain it: and that what we exist for is much more a matter of relations to others than a matter of individual progress: much more a matter of helping others to heaven than of getting there ourselves.
— Lewis Carroll, born on this date in 1832
Tuesday, January 26, 2021
Hmm …
… Trump and the Failure of the Expert Class - WSJ.
… the most salient theme of the past five years was not any challenge to democracy. The great theme of the Trump years, the one historians will note a century from now, was the failure of America’s expert class. The people who were supposed to know what they were talking about, didn’t.
See also: The suicide of expertise: Glenn Reynolds.
It was the experts — characterized in terms of their self-image by David Halberstam in The Best and the Brightest — who brought us the twin debacles of the Vietnam War, which we lost, and the War On Poverty, where we spent trillions and certainly didn’t win. In both cases, confident assertions by highly credentialed authorities foundered upon reality, at a dramatic cost in blood and treasure. Mostly other people’s blood and treasure.
And these are not isolated failures. The history of government nutritional advice from the 1960s to the present is an appalling one: The advice of “experts” was frequently wrong, and sometimes bought-and-paid-for by special interests, but always delivered with an air of unchallengeable certainty.
As Richard Feynman once said, "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."
Always worth reading …
… Worth a Second Reading | The Russell Kirk Center. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Schall wants his readers to realize that each of us has a decision to make, and a freely made decision it must be. After all, the “purpose of the Cosmos and our place within it” is to make possible that very decision.
Oops …
… New Yorker Gives Back Magazine Award Over Japan ‘Rental Family’ Story. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
People who have dealt with Family Romance said some of its services were real but the people its owner introduced to the media as customers were often themselves actors.
Something to think on …
Keep doing good deeds long enough, and you'll probably turn out a good man in spite of yourself.
— Louis Auchincloss, who died on this date in 2010
Monday, January 25, 2021
Yes, indeed …
… Thank you for the library and museum, Mr. Carnegie.
He paid for the Holmesburg Library I spent many a day in as a kid. It's where, one morning, I discovered H.D.'s poetry. "Pear Tree" has been a favorite of mine ever since/
Too clever by half …
… Oscar Wilde, my grandfather, ‘talked himself into prison’.
Here, as he reads from the cross examination, Holland groans. “Oh God! Honestly! How he could have done that. He had one joke too many and he talked himself into prison.”
That was my conclusion when I read an account of the trial many years ago.
In case you wondered …
… Yeats Now: How WB’s poetry still echoes in our lives. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Yeats’s great gift, and one which poets are still learning from, would seem to be his ability, acquired “labouring in ecstasy”, to achieve maximum intensity with minimal means, using simple nouns and verbs as well as basic metres, turbocharging rhetoric to make some of the most memorable – and most-often quoted – lines in the English language.
Be careful what you wish for …
… The New Censors | City Journal. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Journalists celebrate the destruction of freedoms on which their profession depends. Also good to remember Stein's Law: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."
Something to think on …
What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one's memories.
— W. Somerset Maugham, born on this date in 1874
The romance of retail …
… Retail Heaven | The Russell Kirk Center. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Sayaka Murata’s 2016 tale of a woman who becomes the perfect convenience-store employee, her whole body humming with the rhythms of the store, could have been a tragedy or even a grotesque. Instead it’s a strange romance, in which Keiko is the ingenue facing down societal disapproval in order to be with her fluorescent-lit, fully stocked beloved. Keiko, far from stalling out in life, has to grow and change in order to turn her early infatuation with Smile Mart into a mature love. Keiko’s voice, rendered in English by Ginny Tapley Takamori, is bright and curious, forthright and full of a kind of discount wonder. Convenience is a bit repetitive, perhaps too blunt in insisting that Keiko longs to be “a normal cog in society.” But on the rare occasions when Keiko reaches for metaphor, she shines: A baby’s cheek is “strangely soft, like stroking a blister.” She’s a little too chromium-plated to be sweet, a little too Teflon-coated to be gentle, and yet she’s a charmer and a delight. Her joy in the store radiates off the page.
Sunday, January 24, 2021
Talk about cruel …
… Democrats Hiss In Terror As ACB Pulls Out Crucifix | The Babylon Bee.
Just a reminder: The Babylon Bee is a satire site, a Christian satire site.
Persona poems …
… Review: Andalusian Hours: Poems from the Porch of Flannery O’Connor by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
To delve deeply into another’s psyche and try to make plain what perhaps even the subject herself has not fully realized is risky, especially with our contemporary sensitivity to cultural appropriation, but neither Ovid (nor any author of persona poetry that I can think of) felt compelled to justify their “stealth / and nerve to steal your mind and heart.” Perhaps because so many of us assume personal Flannery ownership, we react proprietarily, but in accepting these sonnets as literary creations, authorial what-if musings, I was thoroughly engaged. Did I agree? Disagree? Ever thought of that before? And so forth.
Soul brothers …
… Bright Star, Green Light by Jonathan Bate review – the parallel lives of a pair of romantics. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
…
I find the ambition of Jonathan Bate’s new book a little on the mad side. Crikey, but this is daring. Attempting to squeeze the short, dazzling lives of Fitzgerald and Keats, already so much written about, into one short volume, he asks a huge amount of himself, and of his reader. Flipping between 19th-century Hampstead and 20th-century Los Angeles, between Keats’s mooning after the barely outlined figure of Fanny Brawne and Fitzgerald’s tortured relationship with the altogether more vivid creation that was his wife, Zelda, has the potential to cause a certain amount of dizziness. I felt at moments as though I was caught between two lovers. When I was with Keats, I longed to get back to Fitzgerald; when I was with Fitzgerald, I would experience a sudden, fierce pang for Keats.
Something to think on …
The human spirit is itself the most wonderful fairy tale that can possibly be. What a magnificent world lies enclosed within our bosoms! No solar orbit hems it in, the inexhaustible wealth of the total visible creation is outweighed by its riches!
— E. T. A. Hoffmann, born on this date in 1776
Saturday, January 23, 2021
Something new and brave …
… Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford review - both a requiem and a giving of new life | Francis Spufford | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
“What if, what if”, people keep wondering in Light Perpetual; “Why this life and not the other?” The novel itself, for all its intricate realism, is questing for alternative histories, other futures. How can the loss of a life be measured, Spufford asks: “How can that loss be known, except by laying this absence, now and onwards, against some other version of the reel of time?” Once we’ve switched to this “other reel”, it comes as a shock to look back, to be reminded of the history that blew these children to dust. So Spufford proceeds with acts of measuring that defeat all tapes and scales, considering the inestimable value of people by imagining them gone. The novel is both a requiem and a giving of new life, fusing death and resurrection as they are fused in the Christian liturgy: “Let light perpetual shine upon them.”
Something to think on …
I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.
— Derek Walcott, born on this date in 1930
Quintet …
… Five Best: Philip Terzian on Memoirs by Writers - WSJ. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The Percy memoir sounds very interesting. The Mencken is a classic.
Appreciation …
… Appreciating Walter Williams | Hoover Institution. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Walter and his sister were raised by their mother in a government housing project in North Philadelphia. His father had left his mother when he was “two or three years old.” Walter educated himself by reading. He got first library card when he was six or seven and every Saturday he walked to the public library and checked out multiple books.
The late Al Smith, the Inquirer editorial assistant, who was also a Baptist minister, and who married Debbie and me, grew up in that same project and knew William.
Friday, January 22, 2021
I guess …
… It's time to stop blaming boomers - UnHerd. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Boomers, Andrews writes, thought that they could wield the power of their predecessors without all the nasty bits. Adventuring economists like Jeffrey Sachs, for example, believed that they could teach foreign governments how to run their countries without actually having to subordinate them. Andrews argues, however, that such meddling was not less but more hubristic and presumptuous about the world than that of honest old-fashioned imperialists. It is only a shame that the neoconservatives, who planned short, painless wars to make space for the flowering of liberal democracy and ended up with long, attritive wars making space for snake oil salesmen and ethnic strife, don’t get more of a look-in here.I was born in 1941. So I am not a Boomer.
Something to think on …
God preserve us from writers who regurgitate what they have learnt from books! It is people's secrets we want to know — it is the natural history of the human heart that we have been trying to put down for a thousand years and everyone must and can leave their contribution.
— August Strindberg, born on this date in 1849
Just so you know…
… How Religion Shaped Modern Economics - WSJ. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The idea that we are morally conscious agents, with free will and the power of choice, had important implications for the economic sphere as well. This more expansive and more optimistic vision of human character helped to foster new insights into the beneficial consequences of individual initiative. If people can understand what is in their spiritual interest and act on it, they can do the same for their worldly interests, improving their own lives and the lives of others, too. Adam Smith’s crucial contribution was to identify market competition as the mechanism that enables individual initiative to realize its potential.
Thursday, January 21, 2021
A true original …
… Why George MacDonald Matters |. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
After writing Phantastes, MacDonald was besieged with letters from readers who assumed that it was an allegory too subtle for them to grasp. Like giving up and asking for the solution to a crossword puzzle, readers appealed to the author to send them the “key” for interpreting it. MacDonald wearily explained that there was no master key – that readers were free “to take any meaning they themselves see in it.” Once again, readers have long learned to accept such a state of things, but MacDonald is the one who made it possible. It is hard to imagine a bewildering romp of a novel such as G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (1908) were it not for MacDonald.
A truly frightening piece …
… which is to say a piece about me: Paul Davis On Crime: Frank Wilson And The Night Elmore Leonard Came To Philadelphia.
Something to think on …
Everything is beautiful in a person when he turns toward God, and everything is ugly when it is turned away from God.
— Pavel Florensky, born on this date in 1882
Wednesday, January 20, 2021
Blogging note …
I received word last night that Walt Birbeck, my oldest and best friend, passed away on Sunday. We last got together just before Thanksgiving. I don’t much feel like blogging right now. Maybe later on.
A sad anniversary …
… Aaron Would Have Been 34 Years Old | Aaron Swartz Day and International Hackathon. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Further proof that blind faith in government is unwise.
Something to think on …
People are eternally divided into two classes, the believer, builder, and praiser...and the unbeliever, destroyer and critic.
— John Ruskin, who died on this date in 1900
Tuesday, January 19, 2021
How very sad …
… Kathy Hacker, longtime journalist and Inquirer editor, dies at 71.
Kathy was everything the article says and much more besides. I feel chilly and growrn old.
Our newspaper of record …
… Most Popular President In History To Be Inaugurated In Secret Behind Giant Wall Guarded By Thousands Of Soldiers | The Babylon Bee.
I do understand that the humor-challenged among us — God bless them — may not be amused.
Alice Munro
The experience of reading Alice Munro is a bit, I think, like studying a painting: each story represents a moment, a scene. They are not series of moments, as a novel might be; instead, they are vignettes, peering into a fixed reality.
For me, the best of Munro's stories are those like 'Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage' -- stories which lurk in the space between the local and the universal, stories which imagine the impact of the random or unintended on lives and relationships. 'Hateship,' I thought, emerged as the strongest story in Munro's Vintage collection: it was long enough to develop a sense of tension, but short enough to resolve it.
I will admit, however, that some of Munro's pieces struggled, in my reading, to transcend the nagging tendency of short-story writers to leave little crumbs along the way, to propose tangents and distractions when diversion is itself not necessary. The result is an equivalent tendency among readers of short stories to focus too heavily on the red herring, to make every effort not to overlook that one critical word. It's sometimes as if the stories are too delicate.
Thankfully, Munro engages this habit far less than some of her peers, and her stories, as I suggest, are stronger for it: they are equal measures patient and balanced. And more than that, of course: they address content not often explored in contemporary fiction, including old age and the process of aging.
Ultimately, I found Munro best when focused on the detail, when describing the smallest of paintings -- or when more expansive, when charting the impact of unintended decisions on life, love, and happiness. Certainly 'Hateship' is a successful exercise in literary expression.
RIP …
… Sharon Begley, path-breaking science journalist, dies at 64 - STAT. Hat tip, Dave Lull,)
When the pandemic hit last year, she was at the forefront of STAT’s coverage until she herself got sick — with lung cancer, it turned out — breaking down computer modeling studies, mortality data, and wastewater analyses to help millions make sense of a disorienting barrage of un-vetted information. Sharon’s was a voice readers knew they could trust.
A bit of self-defense
… The Making of a Misogynist - Joseph Epstein, Commentary Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Might it be that many of the people who wrote such vile things to me, or pronounced upon my op-ed on social media or in actual media, were in fact offended by my pointing up the degradation of the contemporary university? Might it be that my even partially describing this degradation of higher education, and the subsequent devaluation of its degrees, ordinary and honorary, on which they feel that their prestige depends offended them more than a thousand kiddos? By mocking the state of the university, did they feel I was attacking the foundation on which their own lives have been built? Might R.R. Reno, writing about my op-ed in First Things, be on target when he writes: “That Epstein should note the obvious—that credentials are the cheap cellophane in which elites wrap themselves when they lack real achievements and nobility of soul that win respect—galls them.”
As long ago as 1931, in The Theory of Eduction in the United States, Albert Jay Nock argued that American universities were devolving to mere trining schools.
Something to think on …
Those who are capable of tyranny are capable of perjury to sustain it.
— Lysander Spooner, born on this date in 1808
Monday, January 18, 2021
For all of us …
… Christian Wiman | Survival is a Style | reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Wiman’s duelling with secular tensions is, in this book as elsewhere in Wiman’s writing, manifested in his profound empathy with the duels that others also undergo. In that sense, survival is the style for most of us. And if ‘style’ seems an inappropriate word for survival, it is a characteristic of Wiman’s very raw, visceral sense of irony. Thus, the ‘confessional’ in Wiman’s writing sits cheek by jowl with the ironic ‘sacrifice’ of so many lives. As he puts it in long poem, ‘The Parable of Perfect Silence’ with its own highly ironised title, these are ‘Hard lives hardly there’. And he admits that ‘When I began writing these lines / it was not, to be sure, inspiration but desperation, / to be alive, to believe again in the love of God.’
Lost continent of perfection …
… on Atlantis, A Journey in Search of Beauty by Carlo and Renzo Piano. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Travelogue, natural history, mariner’s meditation, and architecture drama, Atlantis is animated by Renzo’s restless mind and lively recollections. But it is Carlo who weaves all sorts of relevant bits into the tale. For instance, he tells us that the modern Greek word anoxis means “spring” – but originally, the word “meant the moment a ship sails into the open sea, as well as the moment when your mind grasps an idea for the first time.” Atlantis itself is Carlo’s attempt to grasp the dynamics of his father’s creativity, a force that has managed to envision work, performance, institutional and living spaces in so many different environments and cultures. The voyage trope provides an armature on which not only to erect a vision of his father, but to consider the vastness of what is manifest and hidden.
Something to think on …
There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy.
— Jacob Bronowski, born on this date in 1908
Sunday, January 17, 2021
The genuine article …
… Jack Thompson of All Trades - Bruce Bawer, Commentary Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Poetry — the real thing …
… MARILYN HACKER: ELEGY. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
This is at once deeply moving and technically dazzling.
Q&A …
… Is America's Golden Age Over? How Can We Restore American Greatness? | The Stream. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… free societies are much more creative. One statistic I cite in my book is this: Switzerland with its eight million people has produced 25 Nobel Prize winners in science, including Einstein. The People’s Republic of China with its 1.3 billion has produced just one. That’s not a racial thing. Scientists of Chinese extraction have won Nobels in the United States, Canada and France.
Something to think on …
Freedom of inquiry, freedom of discussion, and freedom of teaching — without these a university cannot exist.
— Robert Maynard Hutchins, born on this date in 1899
Saturday, January 16, 2021
Appreciation — sort of …
… Who Chopped Off the Priest’s Nob? (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Despite the Irishness of Banville’s murder story, it nevertheless appears generic. So much so that in the second chapter, someone says that “Poirot himself appears in the scene.” This reference to Agatha Christie’s famous detective is one of many allusions Banville makes to classic literature, myths, and fairy tales. (He even references his own work, with mentions of the new State Pathologist in Dublin, Dr. Quirke, the protagonist of most Benjamin Black books.)
Hmm …
… out of Stanford University: Assessing Mandatory Stay‐at‐Home and Business Closure Effects on the Spread of COVID‐19.
Conclusions
While small benefits cannot be excluded, we do not find significant benefits on case growth of more restrictive NPIs. Similar reductions in case growth may be achievable with less restrictive interventions.
Imagine that.
Something to think on …
Politics, as I never tire of saying, is for social and emotional misfits, handicapped folk, those with a grudge. The purpose of politics is to help them overcome these feelings of inferiority and compensate for their personal inadequacies in the pursuit of power.
— Auberon Waugh, who died on this date in 2001
Friday, January 15, 2021
Drawing like a pirate …
… Peake practice - The Spectator - news, politics, life & arts. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
‘Peake was synesthetic,’ explains Rachel Foss, curator of the new archive. ‘The act of drawing was often part of his literary process… It’s impossible to separate his art from his writing.’
Interesting …
… History of early American Catholics late author's crowning achievement | Catholic Courier. (Hat tip, Tim Davis.)
Starr also devotes attention to European Catholics who figured prominently in the Patriot victory, such as the Polish engineer Thaddeus Kosciuszko.
And he notes the singular Baron von Steuben of Prussia, a "Catholic-friendly Calvinist" educated by Jesuits who served as master drill sergeant for the army. Von Steuben is credited with establishing the drilling norms that Patriot soldiers, who mostly viewed their bayonets as a cooking spit, desperately needed.
Fabulous figures …
… Wildlife Photographer Promotes Lion Conservation With Stunning Portraits. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Being close to any lion is absolutely phenomenal, their power is palpable, but with the added unique white coat it's just a privilege!!
Q &A …
… Heather Clark on her Sylvia Plath biography Red Comet. Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
I really tried not to use words like obsessive that pathologized her. I really tried to watch my language to the level of individual words. But every once in a while, something would slip through, and my editor would catch it. I guess I had even started thinking maybe she was more fragile than I came to discover she was. By the end of the book, she seemed so strong—strong in the sense that she had such a clear vision of her vocation, and she had such a strong will, and she wanted to fulfill her calling. Nothing could deviate her from fulfilling that literary calling.
I was so impressed by that. Of course, when severe depression struck, it was a different story. When she became ill. But in her day-to-day life this amazing sense of fortitude and strength really came across to me as I researched her.
Wow …
… from Stone: 24 by Osip Mandelstam | Poetry Foundation. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Yesterdat was the anniversary of Mandelstam's birth in 1891.
Something to think on …
Moons and years pass by and are gone forever, but a beautiful moment shimmers through life a ray of light.
— Franz Grillparzer, born on this date in 1791
Case in point …
… The Antifa thugs shame America - UnHerd.
[Andy] Ngo is everything the progressive Left should be in favour of. The son of Vietnamese immigrants to America, he was raised in Portland and, while doing a Master’s degree at the local university, began his career at the student newspaper.
It was there that I first noticed him. He showed himself to be one of the insightful people of his age who had seen through the identity politics that were roiling their generation. Ngo had pointed out that as a person of colour, of immigrant heritage who happened to be gay, his politics and outlook on the world should have been ordained for him. The radical left clearly thought they should be able to speak for him, and yet they clearly did not. Ngo asserted the right — whatever his characteristics — to be allowed to think for himself and not to be told that he had to fall in line with some specific political project because of his background.
Thursday, January 14, 2021
Tracking the decline …
… A novel ending - The Spectator - news, politics, life & arts. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
One thinks of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Fielding’s Tom Jones, Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Stendhal’s Rouge et Noirand Tolstoy’s War and Peace; of Melville’s Moby-Dick, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises; of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! Of these, among the most easily recognizable and celebrated titles in the history of western literature, not one exhibits a trace of the solipsism, self-referentiality, self-identity and the narrow, intolerant and vicious puppy ideology that are among the more disgusting features of the novel in the 21st century. Instead their concern is with the natural world and the creatures that inhabit it; with human society at every level and including every type of human personality; with history, war and peace; with ennobling adventure and thrilling experience; with high passions and great loves; with good versus evil; with life and death; ultimately, with the relationship between mankind and the Divine.
Something to think on …
Why is it that people with the most narrow of minds seem to have the widest of mouths?
— Lewis Carroll, who died on this date in 1898
Me, either …
… Anecdotal Evidence: 'I Could Never Abide "Group Think"'. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Normally, declarations of independence are intended to mask one’s profound loyalty to some cause or fashion. In his thinking, Pipes seems to have been that human curiosity, a genuinely independent thinker.
Mark thy calendar…
… Katonah Poetry Series — Gregory Djanikian Introduced by Billy Collins.
Sunday, January 31, 2021 at 4:00 pm Reading via Zoom
Wednesday, January 13, 2021
Our newspaper of record …
… Trump Praised For Accepting Election Results 4 Years Quicker Than Hillary Clinton Did | The Babylon Bee.
Feel free to object. Rest assured I won't delete your comment.
Good for them …
… Epic! Twitter Competitor Gab Backed Up Trump's Twitter Account and Recreated It on Their Platform.
I deactivated my Twitter account yesterday (I hardly used it, except from time to time to tell assorted politicians to go stuff it). Of course, the servile true believers will object to what Gab has done. They also won't be celebrating World Logic Day. So don't try persuading them.
Oh, I forgot. Gab is a free speech advocate.
Well, this is important these days …
… World Logic Day - a small contribution! - Logic MattersLogic Matters. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
And here is a freeload to help you out.
Anniversary …
… Tintin at 90 - The Oldie. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Over the years, Hergé became, to some extent, a victim of his own obsession. After hundreds of letters from Tintin fans were posted to Professor Calculus in Room 122 on the fourth floor of the Cornavin Hotel, the management sent Hergé a huffy letter pointing out that such a room number did not exist. But in the end, art triumphed over reality, and, when the letters kept coming, the management were obliged to introduce a Room 122 where none had been before.
Something to think on …
Conscious faith is freedom. Emotional faith is slavery. Mechanical faith is foolishness.
— G. I. Gudjieff, born on this date in 1866
Tuesday, January 12, 2021
Fiction as sacrament …
… George Saunders on Story | Joshua Hren | First Things. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
But for Saunders, however emotive his morality may be, fiction is fundamentally moral; a badly-made story lacks moral authority and a well-made one can lead us to love better. Saunders is not wrong to trace the pulse of many literary problems to our strivings after moral salvation: Great works contain multitudes. The Russians teach us that lasting literature is not merely “something decorative,” Saunders writes, but “a vital moral-ethical tool.”
Be afraid, be very afraid …
… VOTE FOR BIDEN, THEY SAID. AMERICA WILL RETURN BACK TO NORMAL, THEY SAID.
The true believers, of course, those who seem to buy into any official opinion, will naturally object.
Biography of a place …
… Review of Debra Di Blasi’s Selling the Farm.
In Di Blasi’s hands, memoir is not a work of confession. As she writes in the prologue, she views autobiography as pretense—observing the past inevitably alters it, and any memoir that fails to recognize this fact is fiction. She calls attention to her self-editing through white space, indented text that often breaks the fourth wall. As Di Blasi explained in an interview about the book, “The intent is not only to illuminate the many facets of remembering but also to reflect the process of writing and revising one’s recollections, exposing the fallibility of memory and the intrusion of self-aggrandizement.”
Appreciation …
… My Brilliant Friend — Peter W. Huber, 1952–2021. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
A beautiful mind was taken from the world, but his ideas through the legacy of his words will continue to help illuminate our future.
Something to think on …
The saddest thing in life and the hardest to live through, is the knowledge that there is someone you love very much whom you cannot save from suffering.
— Agatha Christie, who died on this date in 1976
Monday, January 11, 2021
Good …
… Twitter Shares Drop by 12 Percent After Company Banned Trump.
Who the hell elected Jack Dorsey to anything?
A singular anniversary …
… Hungry like the rabbit - The Spectator - news, politics, life & arts. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
There are few American creations more endearing or enduring than Bugs Bunny. As voiced in the Noo Yawk accent of Mel Blanc, Bugs embodies a national character that combines street smarts with whimsy, reserve with reluctant but ultimately total engagement. He also emerged on the world stage at just the right moment in history.
The state of the world …
… First Known When Lost: Presence.
So here we are again. But all is not lost. Some of us continue to love, and attempt to preserve, what Wordsworth and MacNeice loved (and feared for). Yet at times one does think of the Roman living contentedly, going about his or her daily business, seeing dust on the horizon, having never heard of Visigoths, Ostrogoths, and Vandals.
Brethren boy …
… Garrison Keillor's "That Time of Year" ~ The Imaginative Conservative. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
This is … an engaging, even disarmingly, honest memoir. It isn’t searingly honest. Nor is it thoroughly honest, if only because it isn’t introspectively deep. But engaging and disarming it is, whether the subject is either of his two failed marriages or his brutal separation from Minnesota Public Radio over what amounted to an essentially bogus sexual harassment claim.
Something to think on …
You may not get everything you dream about, but you will never get anything you don't dream about.
— William James, born on this date in 1842
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