Monday, October 31, 2022

Probably my favorite poet …

… Resurrecting John Keats | The Russell Kirk Center. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… We love Keats because, as Miller points out as she guides us through Keats’s poetry and life, he simultaneously embraced poetry as a rest from our restless lives while not removing the nitty-gritty reality of the muck and mud world we live in. Life is messy and complicated. Love is messy and complicated. Genius is messy and complicated. And Keats’s poetry and own life is messy and complicated. We find ourselves, our own hearts and souls, in its aspirations and disappointments, in the poetry Keats bequeathed to the world. 

The music of his verse has always enchanted me. 

Celebrating the BBC...

 ...100 sites for 100 years 

An introduction here

The place and buildings are here


Something to think on …

An attitude of permanent indignation signifies great mental poverty. Politics compels it votaries to take that line and you can see their minds growing more impoverished every day, from one burst of righteous indignation to the next.
— Paul Valery, born on this date in 1871

Saturday, October 29, 2022

Hmm …

Carl Phillips on the Value of Silence for Writers. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The dead don’t miss the world. They can’t. The dead don’t miss us.

Having never, to the best of my knowledge, been dead, I can’t say what the dead know or think.

Unfortunate anniversary …

… Infamous killer sent to New York prison’s electric chair.

Like Auberon Waugh, Evelyn’s son, I am opposed to capital punishment , for the simple reason that it is wrong to kill people.

Something to think on …

I'm not afraid of death. It's the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life.
— Jean Giraudoux, born on this date in 1882

Blogging note …

 I have to go shopping while Petra, Debbie’s aide for today is here. I’ll do some blogging when I get back.

Something to think on …

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.
— Evelyn Waugh, born on this date in 1903

Thursday, October 27, 2022

Sounds interesting enough to me …

… for me to have just pre-ordered the Kindle version: Bob Dylan's bonkers, misogynistic 'Philosophy of Modern Song' - Los Angeles Times.

Bob is five months older than I. I am surprised, sort of, that his experiences of women seem so unfortunate. The ladies still like me. But then I was raised by women (from earliest childhood I knew them up close and personal. And I saw how they thought and felt about each other). This review suggests that Bob is still Bob, telling the truth about his experience, which is neither yours nor mine, but has made for some wondrous songs.

Why everyone I know thinks my former employer is a joke …

Philadelphia Inquirer staff shredded for saying Fetterman won debate with Oz: ‘Clown world in action'. (Hat tip, Paul Davis.(j

The Inquirer ought to admit to its readers that it just shills for the Democratic Party. Yeah, Fetterman — who never encountered a homicide suspect he didn’t love — is mentally competent. Then again, they probably think Joe Biden is. They ought to start hiring reporters, not people who just have journalism degrees

Yes, it does …

… The Church Needs Beauty | Maggie Gallagher | First Things. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Since Vatican II, the Church has largely ceased to play its historic role as commissioner of liturgical music. Sacred music composers have thus found that they are mostly asked to write for the concert stage. We risk losing something when two generations of composers are never given the opportunity to master the craft of writing for the liturgy, for the worship of God. 

Something to think on …

Life always offers you a second chance. it's called tomorrow.
— Dylan Thomas, born on this date in 1914

Something to think on …

As long as there are flowers and children and birds in the world, have no fears: everything will be fine.
— Nikos Kazantzakis, who died on this date in 1957

Tuesday, October 25, 2022

Words of wisdom …

 Bruce Charlton's Notions: Irony is weakness. (Hat tip, Dave lull.)

The chronically ironic are rarely serious.

Not a bad idea …

TRY THIS. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Sister Maria D. Jackson, assigned to Our Lady of Pompeii, where my paternal grandparents were married in 1929, was a stranger to me. But my mind was on that childhood picture of the Devil, and I was anxious to start balancing the ledger of my actions. As we went from house to house, I was candid about the behavior that had brought me to her and took pains to let her know that the marriage had never been violent. Just a boatload of selfishness for which I wanted a do-over, itself a form of selfishness.

She reached into a pocket of her black skirts, took out a Rosary, and handed it to me.

“Here,” she said. “Try this.”

The Rosay seems to work for me. I say it every night at bedtrime. 

Something to think on …

The Bill of Rights was not written to protect governments from trouble. It was written precisely to give the people the constitutional means to cause trouble for governments they no longer trusted.
— Henry Steele Commager, born on this date in 1902

Monday, October 24, 2022

In case you wondered …

The Butcher’s Books: how did Tennyson write In Memoriam. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Tennyson recorded quotations and memories associated with Hallam in long, thin blank books that butchers traditionally used to account for profits and losses; accordingly, these manuscripts became known as the Butcher’s Books. Their structure mirrored the form of the poem developing inside of them. By writing in short quatrains, Tennyson could linger on the empty spaces left between thoughts—the divisions that create a stanza. And while poetry performs its own acts of cutting—by dividing language into literary forms—Tennyson emphasized carving as a theme. The Butcher’s Books highlight how cutting (stanzas, for example), despite its violent connotations, proved to be generative: the butcher disassembles a carcass and transforms it into nourishment. Likewise, Tennyson arranged worn-out commonplaces to form a spiritually recuperative poem.

Something to think on …

Both art and faith are dependent on imagination; both are ventures into the unknown.
— Denise Levertov, born on this date in 1923

Happy birthday …

… The Remarkable Diaries of Composer Ned Rorem (Who Celebrates His 99th Birthday Today). (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The end result is a literary achievement unmatched by any other composer. In aggregate, the Rorem diaries are the most remarkable firsthand documentation we have of a musical life—surpassing those of Charles Burney, Sergei Prokofiev, Benjamin Britten, or whomever else you care to cite. Not even Mozart’s voluminous letters can match the scope and depth of Rorem’s six decades of journaling. He operates on a larger sphere, up their with Pepys and Boswell and others at the pinnacle of the diary as a literary genre.

I met Ned once. He seemed to me a very nice person. 

Something to thing on …

The beautiful are shyer than the ugly, for they move in a world that does not ask for beauty
— Ned Rorem. Born on this date in 1923

Hmm …

 more miscellaneous musings : Remembering a televised speech of extraordinary gravity.

I turned 21 on October 14, 1962. A couple of years later I started work in the field of arms control and disarmament. We were not as worried about these things as the media encouraged the population to be.

Densely allusive …

… Like Briefly Discovering You Are Sane - by Jeremy Noel-Tod. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The Book of Baruch can feel indigestibly disagreeable, especially once it goes beyond the dazzling opening poems on London in the Blitz. But the loose rhymes that run through its end-stopped lines travel like cracks along a whip, and these are what I read it for..

i once introduced Geoffrey Hill at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. He seemed at first an odd combination of dour and drill —. a sourpuss with a sense of humor. But afterwards, in the green room, I told him that when I was reading about in order to give a reasonably intelligent introduction, I discovered that he and I had something personal in common. “Oh yeah, what’s that?”  “We’re both the sons of policemen.”

“Really?”  We started exchanging stories and when we went our separate ways, he turned to me and said, with a twinkle in his eye, “It really is a brotherhood, isn’t it?”



Something to think on …

A simple grateful thought turned heavenwards is the most perfect prayer.
— Doris Lessing, born on this date in 1919

Friday, October 21, 2022

Sadly true …

… The Present Desolation - The Catholic Thing.
… those who do look to the Church now look through time. The latest encyclical from the latest pope has not much influence or authority. It is unlikely to receive as much publicity as the opinion of the Magisterium in times past.


It is always useful to recall some wise words of Hilaire Belloc: "The Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine — but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight."

I remind myself regularly that heard of the Church remains Jesus. The Pipe is only an administrative stand-in. I attend Mass, receive the sacraments, etc., and I pray, meditate. and try my best to live accordingly.I care little about the institutional Church. How, in so short a time, we could have from Pope St John Paul II to the current occupant of the Papal throne is a mystery to me, but I fear a telling one.

Something to tink on …

The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
— Usuka K. Le Guin, born on this date in 1929

Something to think on …

Only divine love bestows the keys of knowledge.
— Arthur Rimbaud, born on this date in 1854

Something to think on …

Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.
— Lewis Mumford, born on this date in 1895

Hmm …

… The Hard Labor of Christian Apologetics - The Catholic Thing. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Maybe something other than apologetics is needed. Consider the fromThe Cloud of Unknowing:

A man may know completely and ponder thoroughly every created thing and its works, yes, and God’s works, too, but not God himself. Thought cannot comprehend God. And so, I prefer to abandon all I can know, choosing rather to love him whom I cannot know.1 Though we cannot know him we can love him. By love he may be touched and embraced, never by thought. Of course, we do well at times to ponder God’s majesty or kindness for the insight these meditations may bring. But in the real contemplative work you must set all this aside and cover it over with a cloud of forgetting. Then let your loving desire, gracious and devout, step bravely and joyfully beyond it and reach out to pierce the darkness above.2 Yes, beat upon that thick cloud of unknowing with the dart of your loving desire and do not cease come what may.


Tuesday, October 18, 2022

Hmm …

Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Maybe Mallon should have stuck with his stated subject — the epistolary novella. His view of the film is at odds with that the critics and audiences in 1957, when the film was released. It was a box office smash and a critical hit as well. The New York Times’s critic wrote that "This is largely Mr. Sinatra's show...he projects a distinctly bouncy likeable personality into an unusual role. And his rendition of the top tunes, notably "The Lady Is a Tramp" and "Small Hotel," gives added lustre to these indestructible standards."[

Q&A …

… TO BEAR THE WEIGHT OF LIFEm— An Interview with Dana Gioia. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Poetry is easiest to recognize if the lines are in meter. If I’m talking and I suddenly say, “It was many and many a year ago / In a kingdom by the sea, / That a maiden there lived whom you may know / By the name of Annabel Lee...,” you can recognize the exact point at which I’m going from ordinary speech into a ritual language.


Pretty neat …

3 POEMS BY BRAD LEITHAUSER. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Something to think on …

Eternity is the Absolute present.
— D. T. Suzuki, born on this date in 1870

Monday, October 17, 2022

Hmm …

 Berdyaev on the Moral Source of Atheism. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I have long been an admirer of Berdyaev. He has been a major influence on my own thinking. And he is of course right that there are serious atheists. But they are a minority. Most atheists — Richard Dawkins comes to mind — are people practicing philosophy without a license. And yes, the faith of many believers is shallow.

Time’s visual power …


The Waning Years of Edward Hopper. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

We know from the journals of his wife, Josephine, that his last addition to this canvas was to delicately brush in the clock’s slim hands. He set them to the hour that gives the painting its name, a hushed moment before the shop will open for business. Did Hopper produce this image of an eternal morning as a kind of wish fulfillment, a way to return to the seven A.M. of his own life, to a world at first light, and with it the new beginning promised by each new day? Very possibly, because a new beginning was something the aging Hopper might well have wished for.

Sweet inspiration …

 … In search of lost toast: Paris show reveals origins of Proust’s madeleines    (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Previous versions of French novel featured stale bread, toast and biscuit as trigger for author’s childhood memories

Blogging note …

 Once again, blogging will resume later. My tech guy is on the way here to find out what’s wrong with my computer and printer. After that, I have to pick up meds fir Debbie.

Something to think on …

The poet's first job of work is to put bread on the table.
— Yvor Winters, born on this date in 1900

Sunday, October 16, 2022

Someting to think on …

When you realize that the laws of nature must be incredibly finely tuned to produce the universe we see, that conspires to plant the idea that the universe did not just happen, but that there must be a purpose behind it.
— John Polkinghorne, born on this date in 1930

Saturday, October 15, 2022

Giving a founder his due …

… Once upon a time in America : He has always gotten short shrift, but that should change.

I had lunch with David McCullough in Chicago when he was touring for this biography. A very nice man.
I remember he was wearing an Adams fir President button.

Something to think on …

The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves.
— Italo Calvino, born on this date in 1924

Friday, October 14, 2022

Blogging note …

 It may have been my birthday — and some very nice things happened — but it proved to be much busier than anticipated. I promise to do better to,orrow.

Hmm …

… Once upon a time in America : Historian appears to have been a serial liar and plagiarist.

As a veteran journalist I would want to cross check this carefully. I don’t have a great deal of faith in the New Yorker these days.

Blogging note …

 Once again, I will get around to serious blogging later today.

A presidential birthday …

The older I get, the more I believe in what I can’t explain.


I never forget President Eisenhower’s birthday, it’s also my birthday.

Something to think on …

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
— Hannah Arendt, born on this date in 1906

Letting off more than steam

 … ‘The Waste Land,’ T.S. Eliot’s primal scream, resonates 100 years on. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Eliot’s timing was perfect. “The Waste Land” launched in a world thoroughly demoralized and disillusioned by World War I. All gods were dead, all faiths in man shaken, as F. Scott Fitzgerald famously summed up the period. A two-volume slog called “The Decline of the West” bowed the bookshelves of countless intellectuals, assuring them that civilization was petering out.

A pretty good list ……

 Five Best: Books on Ancient Rome - WSJ. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I am not a fan of Gore Vidal, so I will probably skip that one. But I feel obligated to mention Stothard's own The Spartacus Road, in which the history of Rome certainly figures and is a wonderful book.


Well-deserved appreciation …

… A Master’s Touch: The Literary Legacy of Somerset Maugham. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

In “The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill Alone 1932–1940,” biographer William Manchester noted of Churchill that “the only modern novelist whose skills he admires” was Somerset Maugham.

Thanks to a couple of my English teachers in college — Mr. Burke and Dr. Lynch — I was spared the prejudice of the "intellectuals" at the time against Maugham.  He remains one of my favorite authors.

Unusual artist, unusual letters …

… Love Lucian by David Dawson and Martin Gayford review | Art and design books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Freud was not a letter writer in the sense of two cases the editors mention, Van Gogh and Michelangelo. He was not as driven as the former, or as self-absorbed as the latter. He took his work, but not himself, seriously. Which is not to say that he was unaware of his own worth as an artist, or shy about proclaiming it. Dawson and Gayford suggest, and surely they are right, that the flippancy and raucous humour of the letters, like the hectic private and public doings of the man who wrote them, were a release and a relief from the rigours of a life dedicated to the making of art.

Something to think on …

There's only one way to improve society. Present it with a single improved unit: yourself.
— Albert Jay Nock, born on this date in 1870

Wednesday, October 12, 2022

In praise of Toad et al. …

IMMENSE PEACE. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The pursuit of Toad along the country railway line is one of the most brilliantly compact and exciting pursuit and escape scenes I have ever read, starting from the moment the engine driver hears faintly the noise of a following train, far behind, where no train ought to be.  It was, for many of my school years, a place of refuge. I put it to one side long ago, always promising myself I would read it again. And the other day I did so, perhaps for the first time in fifty years or more. All the paths were familiar. I knew as I turned each page what was coming next. I remembered Toad’s appalled discovery that he had neither pockets nor money, the significance of the squeaky board in the butler’s pantry at Toad Hall, the terrible conceited songs which Toad sang about his own courage, talent and wit. 

Eliot in full …

MORE WISDOM. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Eliot himself was born out of due time, and those who read him with a sympathetic heart will sometimes feel themselves reading works of prophecy. His sense that Christians were singing the Lord’s song in a strange land was strong in the 1930s. What would he feel ninety years on, when the decline of practicing Christians in the West has been so marked, and when the mainstream churches are themselves rent, incapable of knowing—over such matters as homosexuality, abortion, divorce—whether they should hold fast to the tradition or accommodate themselves the times?

Something to think on …

Let go of your plans. The first hour of your morning belongs to God. Tackle the day's work that he charges you with, and he will give you the power to accomplish it.
— Edith Stein, born on this date in 1891

Unhappy anniversary …

… Yellow fever breaks out in Philadelphia - HISTORY. (Hat tip, Tim Davis)
)

I happen to live — lots of people do — where the marsh was that had the skeeters who spread the yellow fever. It’s called South Philly.

Blogging note …

 I am awaiting a cab to take me to Center City to have bloodwork ordered by my cardiologist done. Blogging will resume later..

Something to think on …

If the flame inside you goes out, the souls that are next to you will die of cold.
— François Mauriac, born on this date in 1885

Still robust after all these years …

… Invisible Man at Seventy | The National Endowment for the Humanities. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Ellison’s work is a bildungsroman that chronicles the absurd, nightmarish, surreal, and, at times, hilarious journey of a nameless narrator. He lives in an underground dwelling illuminated by 1,369 lightbulbs stolen from Monopolated Light and Power, with Louis Armstrong’s “(What Did I Do To Be So) Black And Blue” sometimes blasting on the record player. He tells his story: Twenty years earlier, Dr. Bledsoe, the president of his Black college, expelled him from school for showing a poor Black family to a white trustee, and sent him to New York City, with fake promises of employment that left him stranded

Monday, October 10, 2022

Shrewd comparison …

 … ‘Different Speeds, Same Furies’ Review: Of Proust and Powell. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

As a reader who has come to an appreciation of Powell’s “Dance” that sometimes verges on love, immersion in that work has led me to effect a renewed acquaintance with Proust’s novel, rather than tempting me to dismiss or downgrade it. It is Perry Anderson’s achievement that stimulated me to have another go at Proust, even while his original criticism of Anthony Powell was instrumental in provoking yet one more reading of “A Dance to the Music of Time.”

The first book I ever reviewed for The Inquirer was the last volume  of "A Dance to the Music of Time." Being a dutiful sort, I read all the previous volumes first. I have been a fan ever since.

A fresh look at a master’s tales …

On the Richness of Isaac Babel’s Odessa. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Bringing these stories together under one cover allows us to view the larger-than-life figures of Benya the King, Froim the Rook and Lyubka the Cossack through the eyes of the child whose dream of doves is dashed by a pogromist’s blow, whose world is “small and terrible,” who shuts his “only unplastered eye” so that he doesn’t have to see what lies bare before him: “a jagged pebble, like the face of an old woman with a large jaw; and a piece of string; and a clump of feathers, still breathing.”

Surprise, surprise …

 … Satellite Temperature Data Show Almost All Climate Model Forecasts Over the Last 40 Years Were 

The late Freeman Dyson, who was instrumental in the development of computer models, wrote a piece years ago in which he pointed out that the models could not make accurate climate forecasts, because we only have about 150 years of accurate thermometer data. He was soon labeled a climate denier. Ever meet someone who denied that there is something called climate?

But he did the right thing …

… Our president’s “extremely embarrassing situation.”

Worth remembering that he also sent troops to integrate schools in Little Rock

Something to think on …

It's so easy for propaganda to work, and dissent to be mocked.
— Harold Pinter, born on this date in 1930

Sunday, October 09, 2022

The tortuous origin of a great poem

The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem by Matthew Hollis – genesis of a masterpiece. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Matthew Hollis’s book is deeply and brilliantly concerned with all the tendrils of that unhappiness, and Eliot’s triumphant creative response to it. He sifts and rakes over the dead ground of the poet’s broken relationship with his American parents, his disastrous infertile marriage, and the no man’s land of London decimated by Spanish flu after the great war. His quest is for all the seeds of intellectual and emotional pressure that shaped the poem. Such is the energy and engagement of Hollis in this task that you find yourself rooting for the emergence of the poem along with Eliot and his supporters, willing it into life as the book progresses.

Something to think on …

History does not usually make real sense until long afterward.
— Bruce Catton, born on this date in 1899

Saturday, October 08, 2022

In case you wondered …

. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… words dazzle the second-rate mind. I saw it at work in graduate school. The best students did not gape at the impenetrable prose of Judith Butler, or Jacques Derrida and his heaping one negation atop another in his virulent hatred of common-sense Thomism. 

Another blogging not …

 Today was unusually busy., and I am beat. Blogging with resume tipomorror

Blogging note…

 I am a full-time caregiver now. Blogging has to take a backseat sometimes. I have go out early today and shop. I have to cook this afternoon. I will blog from time to time during the day and a bit more this eveninh.

Something to think on …

The ones that measure up are not always the ones you expect.
— Walter Lord, born on this date in 1917

Feline anniversary …

… waiting for the bookmobile : I wonder what T. S. Eliot would have said about these cats.

I rather suspect Eliot would  have been delighted with Cats. I seem to recall that he was fond of musical theater.

Anthony Powell

 


I've just finished the first volume of Anthony Powell's massive sequence A Dance to the Music of Time. That first volume -- 'A Question of Upbringing' -- is excellent: Powell has such a clear and effective style. And if his objective in this installment is to chronicle the passing of youth, well then he's achieved it and more. 

Powell constructs 'A Question of Upbringing' as a series of extended vignettes: his central character, Nick Jenkins, appears throughout, but the rest are populated with an array of eccentric personalities -- which makes the reading so much fun. It's not long before Powell is onto the next character, and Nick's interactions with that person. 

No doubt, this is a novel about social structures in England, and the way they play out, especially, in higher education. But the book is about more than that: it's a portrait of youth, and its waning attempts at innocence. Nick Jenkins is confronted with this passing: from young to old, from shelter to exposure. 

Powell has written a funny, at times poignant, rendering of this transition. With London as his guide -- and with a number of unnamed educational settings, too -- he presents a compelling portrait of a youthful awakening, and the comical elements that accompany it. 'A Question of Upbringing' was a pleasure to read. 

Friday, October 07, 2022

Philly’s dumb mayor …

… Paul Davis: Mayor Kenney’s latest order is a futile and stupid gesture.

I don’t know if Mayor Kenney is an “Animal House” fan, but he had the same idea as Otter when he offered his own futile and stupid gesture in a response to gun violence in Philadelphia by signing a firearms ban at city recreation spaces and facilities. 

Good …

Project Veritas Has One High School Principal Scrambling.

I wonder if this self-styled anarchist has read George Woodcock’s Anarchism. I have. 

In case you wondered …

Sex and the 16th Century: How John Donne Learned To Write Love Poetry. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Was, then, the young Donne a great tumultuous lover: a conqueror of swathes of women? After so much time and so much entropy, we can only guess: but, almost certainly, not. Women of his class would have been hard to seduce—they were fiercely and carefully protected. Make a mistake, they knew, and you could be punished for life. For instance: when beautiful eighteen-year-old Mary Fitton was sent in 1595 to wait on Queen Elizabeth, she found herself captivated by William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke. She was reported “proved with child, and the Earl of Pembroke being examined confesseth a fact but utterly renounceth all marriage.” Mary and the earl were both threatened with the Tower; in the end Herbert was thrown in the Fleet prison and Mary banished from court.

See also:  John Donne’s Proto-Modernism. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

 


 

Something to think on …

An education without a Bible education is no education.
— Clive James, born on this date in 1939

Blogging note …

 Sort of a day off for me. i went to see my cardiologist today. Need to take a stress text next month and need blood work done. Not immediately serious, bur a few matters of concerns. Happens when you’re on the cusp of 81. May do some blogging tonight.

Something to think on …

More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.
— Alfred Lord Tennyson, who died on this in 1892

Living faith …

… Yes, J. F. Powers wrote about priests. But his real subject was America. | America Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

In a 2014 essay for America, Kevin Spinale, S.J., noted that “there are no unspeakable sins” in Powers’s stories of priests, “just sloth, cruelty, ambition and pride.” His characters “convey authenticity without paroxysm. They inhabit a world embraced by a merciful God and made holy by the Incarnation. Powers offers humor with hope.” One gets the sense that while Powers (a daily Massgoer) loved the church immensely, he also saw the artistic value of it—in all its brokenness as well as its beauty—as a background for fiction that traced the vanities and frailties of humankind. In 1964, he said of the institutional church, “there’s nothing bigger, cruder, more vulgar in the world.”

Something to think on …

Truth and love will overcome lies and hatred.
— Václav Havel, born on this date in 1936

Barroom boxers …


The Blondes of Wisconsin–Bukoski’s Best
. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… Blondes is more than a collection of stories, since most of them are integrated, not only by the moral theme that runs through them, but through a series of interlocking characters.  In this respect, the book is more like Faulkner’s The Unvanquished , a kaleidoscopic fictional narrative, than it is a collection.  

Something to think on …

You can keep the things of bronze and stone and give me one man to remember me just once a year.
— Damon Runyon, born on this date in 1880

Always worth reading …


Two Poems by Robert Bly. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden. )

Sometime back in ‘70s, a friend and I spent a very pleasant day with Robert Bly. We drove him to the reading he was giving at Temple University.

Poetry for these days …

… All That’s Left is This Foundation Stone. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)


Amidst the whirl of redundant distractions and a worldwide web of dissolutions, a sense of radical disorientation and ruthless rootlessness has driven us to search out real unity and place, lasting bonds that can withstand the tumult. Tired of being so tossed, resurgent with yearning for deep communion, many are trying to make their way home. If the nostalgia for nostos has been with us since Odysseus, and the promise of E Pluribus Unum is as ancient as Parmenides, these permanent preoccupations of the human spirit are seeing a renaissance while things fall apart.

Latter day faithlessness …

A Eucharistic Faith - The Catholic Thing. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

If you claim to be Catholic, but don’t believe in the Real Presence, then you are not Catholic and shouldn’t bother going to Mass, let alone receive Communion (which you do not believe in. The truly faithful are are there for the miracle. You are committing blasphemy, which you probably don’t believe in either.

Something to think on …

Is this not the true romantic feeling; not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you.
— Thomas Wolfe, born on this date in 1900

Sunday, October 02, 2022

Belated Happy Birthday …

… University of Missouri Press: Author Spotlight: Sam Pickering. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Sam Pickering turned 81 on Friday, September 30. I catch up with him 12 days from now. Any happy returns, Sam.

Hmm …

PRAYER CONCERNING THE NEW, MORE “ACCURATE” TRANSLATION OF CERTAIN PRAYERS. (Dave Lull.)

I detest the modernized versions of the liturgy, which are not only leaden, but often inaccurate. Jesus did not die to take way the sin of the world. The world, to the best of my knowledge, has never committed a sin. I don’t think animals or plants have committed any  either. Only we humans have. Which why Jesus died to take away the sins of the world — including the ones we continue to commit..

So like us all …

God’s grump: The irascible Evelyn Waugh,. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

In 1930, Waugh became a Roman Catholic, writing to his friend (and longtime interlocutor) Martin D’Arcy, S.J., that he had realized “the Roman Catholic Church is the only genuine form of Christianity.” Waugh was a big enough name after Vile Bodies was published that his decision made headlines in the London papers. He later described his reception into the Catholic Church as “like stepping across the chimney piece out of a Looking-Glass world, where everything is an absurd caricature, into the real world God made; and then begins the delicious process of exploring it limitlessly.”

In my junior year of college, if memory served one of my classes was devoted to  the modern novel. During the  summer we were expected to read 10 novels in preparation. The one I chose to start with Brideshead Revisited. I chose it because in my sophomore year I had read Decline and Fall, which may still be the funniest novel i have ever read. After reading it for about 40 minutes, I put the book down and said aloud to myself, “This may well be the saddest book I have ever read.”

Like Waugh I am a serious Catholic, but a most imperfect human. Also, like him, I would be far worse without my faith.