Monday, June 08, 2009
I wonder ...
... what all my friends who are always preaching to me about how we should be more like Europeans think about this: Conservatives racing ahead in EU parliament voting.
No mincing words here ...
... David Stove, Anti-Philosopher. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I wonder if Professor Vallicella is familar with Stove's Darwinian Fairy Tales.
I wonder if Professor Vallicella is familar with Stove's Darwinian Fairy Tales.
Sunday, June 07, 2009
Bryan on Marilynne ...
... For Marilynne.
In the comments Peter Burnet fights the good fight and elberry, as usual, makes wonderful sense,
In the comments Peter Burnet fights the good fight and elberry, as usual, makes wonderful sense,
The best ...
... memorial for the late actor: RIP David Carradine. Also, skip over to Ed's site and do some scrolling.
Bizarre ...
... Biteback: Read 'too Catholic' for UK market. (Hat tip, Paul Davis.)
I wonder if this was the same agent who handled Read's On the Third Day, to which the fundamental tenet of Catholicism - the resurrection - is central. (I just read it; it is an intensely moving book.) As for The Death of a Pope, that's about a Papal election, something that draws headlines all over the world - in other words, an aspect of Catholicism that just about everybody is interested in. Get a new agent, Piers, one a little more in touch with reality.
Here is a snippet from On the Third Day:
Here is a snippet from On the Third Day:
''We all lose sight of God from time to time. He withdraws.''Why?''Perhaps to teach us that he is a person, not an attitude of mind.'
Today's Inquirer reviews ...
... The last words of John Updike, poet. A very nice review, and an inspired choice of reviewer.
... Jack Reacher, hero in white boxers.
That appears to be it.
... Jack Reacher, hero in white boxers.
That appears to be it.
Thought for the day ...
To be at ease is better than to be at business. Nothing really belongs to us but time, which even he has who has nothing else.- Baltasar Gracian
Saturday, June 06, 2009
Time to revise ...
... The case of Karl-Heinz Kurras has all the ingredients of a Cold War spy thriller. (Hat tip, Paul Davis.)
Netherland
I must say, I'm perplexed by the praise that has been showered upon Joseph O'Neill's Netherland. I experienced this novel in much the same way that I did Robinson's Gilead: I couldn't identify a point of entry into the plot, and I found myself distracted by (what Frank Wilson labeled) overly 'precious' prose. Ok, the book is insightful; and ok, it's about an odd, undervalued, demographic in New York City - so? This novel dragged, and as clever and poignant as it was at points, I cringe to think of it - as some have - as a modern Gatsby.
Apocalypse ...
The first reading at Mass this morning was from the book of Revelation:
No pessimism or despair in that.
And I John saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice from the throne, saying: Behold the tabernacle of God with men, and he will dwell with them. And they shall be his people; and God himself with them shall be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes: and death shall be no more, nor mourning, nor crying, nor sorrow shall be any more, for the former things are passed away. And he that sat on the throne, said: Behold, I make all things new.
No pessimism or despair in that.
Three cheers ...
... for Philadelphia’s Gardens of Delights. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
One would think this would be in The Inquirer. Of course, it has no political content.
One would think this would be in The Inquirer. Of course, it has no political content.
Reasonable dissent ...
... Freeman Dyson Takes On The Climate Establishment. (I have just discovered that Dave also sent this to me.)
See also: 'Worse Than Fiction'. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
... when the profile’s author, Nicholas Dawidoff, was asked on NPR’s “On The Media” whether it mattered if Dyson was right or wrong in his views, Dawidoff answered, “Oh, absolutely not. I don’t care what he thinks. I have no investment in what he thinks. I’m just interested in how he thinks and the depth and the singularity of his point of view.”This a more than a little flip, I admit, but the fact is, as a reporter, that is all Davidoff ought to be interested in, since he is not, presumably, qualified to judge for himself whether Dyson is right or not. And we ought to be able to hear what Dyson has to say for himself.
See also: 'Worse Than Fiction'. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Thought for the day ...
We would be in a nasty position indeed if empirical science were the only kind of science possible.- Edmund Husserl
Friday, June 05, 2009
A scientist on scientism ...
... C. S. Lewis: Science and Scientism. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Richard Dawkins, author of The Blind Watchmaker, is the very ideal of a modern materialist reductionist. It has been noted above that the word "reductionism" serves the purpose today that "scientism" played in the 1940s. Let me attempt to give just a flavor of Dawkins' worldview. For example, he describes love as "a product of highly complicated... nervous equipment or computing equipment of some sort." ... When asked if such a worldview is depressing, Dawkins responds "I don't feel depressed about it. But if somebody does, that's their problem. Maybe the logic is deeply pessimistic, the universe is bleak, cold and empty. But so what?"
Unworldly territories ...
... On Poe's 200th anniversary: Marilynne Robinson. (Hat tip, Dave Lull)
Poe made me think about words. Which is the loveliest word, the loveliest letter? I believe I may have known that these are the kinds of almost idle questions one poses to oneself when a night seems to be unending, when the weight of sorrow is so great as to be dangerous.
Way to go, Terry ...
... Sideswipe. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The unnamed New York drama critic apparently can't distinguish between taking in a show and actually doing something to promote theater.
More here: My, how he goes on! He sure does. (Some good comments, though.)
More here: My, how he goes on! He sure does. (Some good comments, though.)
Conservative Poe ...
... Ohio U. professor offers new look at Edgar Allan Poe. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Please read carefully ...
... Standing up for what you don’t believe. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Aquinas was very good at getting inside the viewpoint of those he disagreed with.
One of the few historical generalisations on which philosophers of science agree is what Hilary Putnam originally dubbed the “pessimistic meta-induction”: All theories of wide explanatory scope in science are eventually shown to be empirically false, usually because they overreach their grasp.
Aquinas was very good at getting inside the viewpoint of those he disagreed with.
Provocative ...
... Terence Kealey - 'The Myth of Science as a Public Good'.
England has only one independent university?
England has only one independent university?
Thought for the day ...
Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory.- Sir Thomas Beecham
Thursday, June 04, 2009
This week's batch ...
... of TLS Letters: A light on the Dark Ages, Professor of Poetry, The cinder path, and more.
Mark your calendars ...
... and Come to the Gathering.
Just imagine: Salman Rushdie in upstate Pa. Keystone College, by the way, is a lovely setting, and La Plume is right next to Factoryville, where Christy Mathewson was born.
Just imagine: Salman Rushdie in upstate Pa. Keystone College, by the way, is a lovely setting, and La Plume is right next to Factoryville, where Christy Mathewson was born.
Two views ...
... Poets - yes, poets -
... Pictures from an Institution. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
... Pictures from an Institution. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The idea that poets, by virtue of being poets, are somehow morally superior to anyone is as nonsensical as the idea that priests, by virtue of ordination, are somehow made saints. So-and-so may be a great poet and at the same time a wretched human unqualified thereby for certain roles in society.
My, my ...
... I can't believe this - a book on religion that most scientists would probably not disagree with. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
"Dowd proposes an approach to religion that absolutely accepts evolution." Well, so does Francis Collins and Owen Gingerich and John Polkinghorne and lots and lots of other people, myself included - at least if by evolution one means an biological explanation regarding the origin of species and not a metaphysical explanation of everything. The notion that most religious people do not accept Darwin is one of those myths that demonstrates how parochial secularism can be.
Triumph of the implicit ...
... On the relics of oppression. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
It takes an effort of the imagination, I think, to understand the implications of these ruins, or rather of the constructions that fell into them. Here, perhaps, a minimal understanding of the background is necessary. It was one of the communist criticisms of capitalism, that took a part of the truth for the whole, that capitalism produced not for use but for profit; and in response, communists devised a system that produced neither for use nor for profit, but for propaganda.
Three for three ...
... Yeats, Protestant Ireland and the occult.
I wonder what makes Linda think having parents who were Northern Irish Communists is "such a non-religious background." Communisn, especially under those circumstances, takes good bit of faith - an odd faith, perhaps, but faith nonetheless.
Bad headline ...
... good article: Finding kitsch's inner beauty. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The headline writer should have read the article: "As for beauty, the opposite of kitsch ..."
The headline writer should have read the article: "As for beauty, the opposite of kitsch ..."
Thought for the day ...
Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wednesday, June 03, 2009
And the winner is ...
... Marilynne Robinson wins 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Worth pondering ...
It is instructive to see what has happened in the thought of that wonderful old man, Lord Russell. In his youth he was the leader of the extreme realists, holding that every quality of physical things, including one’s own body, existed independently of its being experienced. In his last important work, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, he comes round to the view that everything we immediately experience lies in the realm of consciousness. The body is not now a solid object among others in public space, but a boiling mass of unobserved and unobservable particles in a space of their own. And the mind is not a set of shadowy processes, but the whole “choir of heaven and furniture of earth” that forms one’s experienced world.
Russell the ancient sage is nearer the truth, I think, than Russell the bright young man. And if so, the place of consciousness in the scientific scheme of things is transformed. For consciousness is then no longer a tenuous shadow whose very existence is doubtful, but our base and starting point, the region of greatest certainty, while the realm of the physical becomes a twilight zone of inference, of hypotheses about the invisible and impalpable, of flights of metaphysical speculation. Matter has become, says Russell with a dash of his pleasant hyperbole, “a wave of probability undulating in nothingness.” No one knows much about it; Bohr’s model of the atom was outdated a decade or two later. Meanwhile both the values and the certainties of life, which lie in the sphere of consciousness, are much the same as they were thousands of years ago.
- from "The Limits of Naturalism" by Brand Blanshard (Hat tip, Dave Lull, responding to a question I had put in an email: "Why do we decide that the only way to validate consciousness is by material means? Seems to me it ought to be the other way around." .)
Wrinkled brows ...
... New Granta Editor Offers Sweet Salve to Chapped Industry.
I think John is on to something here, actually. And it's more to the point than the death-of-books chanting.
The plan this year was to play Maidstone in the Hamptons ...Small wonder these people don't get it.
It helps that Mr. Freeman believes in the inevitability of books—even if, as he will lay out in his forthcoming manifesto for Scribner, The Tyranny of E-Mail, the Internet is engendering in the people who use it habits that distract them from reading.
Thought for the day ...
If we wish to preserve a free society, it is essential that we recognize that the desirability of a particular object is not sufficient justification for the use of coercion.- Friedrich von Hayek
Tuesday, June 02, 2009
Gwen recommends ...
... Mudbound by Hillary Jordan.
I have just finished Mudbound by Hillary Jordan.
Each character is presented as faithfully and beautifully as the deckle-edged, black and white photographs neatly spaced on the big, black pages of my grandmother’s photo album. The people in Jordan’s book are fascinating because of their proximity to my own branch of the American family tree, but none were particularly lovable. Their attitudes are firmly moored to the mid-forties, and cause a frustrating friction with my own modern expectations. Surprisingly, embedded into the spine of Jordan’s book Mudbound is the scent of their cigarettes, their tears, and the oils from their skin. Hillary Jordan skillfully presents an unflinching gaze at a pivotal moment in American History. Although this was an uncomfortable read I will keep this book and read it again, and again.
Art in fiction ...
... Ian MacKenzie's top 10 artworks in novels. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The best novel I know of in which a painting figures is Robertson Davies's What's Bred in the Bone.
The best novel I know of in which a painting figures is Robertson Davies's What's Bred in the Bone.
In conclusion ...
Piers Read has been busy with his tour, but we have arrived a a good stopping point in our email exchange about The Death of a Pope. Here is Part One of our correspondence; and here is Part Two. Further comments welcome.
FW: My final question has to do with the effect on suffering of Christ's redemptive act and the effect this must in turn have on a Catholic writer. But let me get into the question in a roundabout way. There have been - starting, I guess, with The Exorcist - a lot of films (and books, too) in which, despite the best efforts of the good people, evil always either wins out or is not totally defeated. I have always found this aesthetically unsatisfactory. I wonder if this is because of my Catholic sensibility. Christ has defeated evil. Everything bad subsequent to the redemptive act - however awful, however widespread - must amount, in the end, to mere pockets of resistance. So it would seem to me that the Catholic writer must have a fictional world in which this is implicit. This doesn't mean a novel by a Catholic must necessarily have a happy ending or a Pollyannish outlook - the resolution at the end of The Death of a Pope can hardly be called "happy" - but does it not necessarily mean that in a novel written by a believing Catholic evil must always, as it were, be at a disadvantage? God's creation, as Dante put it, is a Commedia.
PPR: Certainly Evil in the last analysis is at a disadvantage but surely the Devil remains Prince of this World and continues to roam it for the ruin of souls? The analogy I sometimes make is that of France during World War II with the forces of evil (the Germans) in control; collaborators in the Vichy government (atheists, Catholic modernists?), those who avoid taking sides and keep their heads down, and of course the Resistance (orthodox Catholics) who, though harried and hunted, are confident in their ultimate salvation from the United States. The analogy is far from perfect: the Soviets, after all, were also the victors and hardly a force for good.
Dante is right, of course: God's creation is a commedia though it may not seem funny to those who suffer. The philosopher Roger Scruton recently wrote that the core values of Western civilisation are Forgiveness and Irony; and certainly in my fiction I have attempted an ironic depiction of those who live by worldly values - less in The Death of a Pope, perhaps - though there is some irony in my depiction of Cardinal Doornik - than in other of my novels.
I would say that The Death of a Pope does have a happy ending in that Kate comes to a proper understanding of right and wrong. I don't want to say more for fear of giving away the denouement to any of your readers who may be reading the novel and have yet to reach the end.
FW: My final question has to do with the effect on suffering of Christ's redemptive act and the effect this must in turn have on a Catholic writer. But let me get into the question in a roundabout way. There have been - starting, I guess, with The Exorcist - a lot of films (and books, too) in which, despite the best efforts of the good people, evil always either wins out or is not totally defeated. I have always found this aesthetically unsatisfactory. I wonder if this is because of my Catholic sensibility. Christ has defeated evil. Everything bad subsequent to the redemptive act - however awful, however widespread - must amount, in the end, to mere pockets of resistance. So it would seem to me that the Catholic writer must have a fictional world in which this is implicit. This doesn't mean a novel by a Catholic must necessarily have a happy ending or a Pollyannish outlook - the resolution at the end of The Death of a Pope can hardly be called "happy" - but does it not necessarily mean that in a novel written by a believing Catholic evil must always, as it were, be at a disadvantage? God's creation, as Dante put it, is a Commedia.
PPR: Certainly Evil in the last analysis is at a disadvantage but surely the Devil remains Prince of this World and continues to roam it for the ruin of souls? The analogy I sometimes make is that of France during World War II with the forces of evil (the Germans) in control; collaborators in the Vichy government (atheists, Catholic modernists?), those who avoid taking sides and keep their heads down, and of course the Resistance (orthodox Catholics) who, though harried and hunted, are confident in their ultimate salvation from the United States. The analogy is far from perfect: the Soviets, after all, were also the victors and hardly a force for good.
Dante is right, of course: God's creation is a commedia though it may not seem funny to those who suffer. The philosopher Roger Scruton recently wrote that the core values of Western civilisation are Forgiveness and Irony; and certainly in my fiction I have attempted an ironic depiction of those who live by worldly values - less in The Death of a Pope, perhaps - though there is some irony in my depiction of Cardinal Doornik - than in other of my novels.
I would say that The Death of a Pope does have a happy ending in that Kate comes to a proper understanding of right and wrong. I don't want to say more for fear of giving away the denouement to any of your readers who may be reading the novel and have yet to reach the end.
If it's Tuesday ...
... my latest column must be up. And so it is: The writer of fiction is no mere copyist.
Thought for the day ...
Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.- Lord Acton
Monday, June 01, 2009
Perennial solace ...
... Now read this! T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.
Perhaps the greatest conundrum of human existence is time, its evanescence balanced by its relentlessness. We can only understand it in the presence of things, such as the “drained pool,” itself a metaphor for time; and we can only understand things in the context of time, their creation, existence, and passing. And, beyond that, most crucially, is what we cannot see or hear or experience as duration, what those of a spiritual bent, “the unseen eyebeam”, perpetually seek: “for the roses/Had the look of flowers that are looked at”. For Eliot, as he says later in Burnt Norton, we can only find that “at the still point of the turning world”, where time and being eternally intersect
Freedom ...
... Liberation theology. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
One of the things "common knowledge" gets wrong about the Galileo case is that the Church at the time subscribed to the consensus among scientists of the day, which preferred Tycho Brahe's model of the solar system to that of Copernicus. Tycho was, after all, the greatest astronomer of his day and one of the greatest ever. Got to to be careful about those scientific consensuses.
Did he, now?
... Frail, cowardly Winston saved us. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
"I believe ... that totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences.”
Orwell's warning seems to me at least as apt today as when he issued it. I think we are as near today to a triumph of totalitarianism as at any time in my life. Naturally, I hope I am wrong. Unfortunately, today's intellectuals seem of a caliber distinctly inferior to those of Orwell's day.
Grand lady of letters ...
... View from a falling house. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Style, for Porter, was a matter of patience; it involved a slow, painstaking distillation of all that she had seen and remembered. In reading her, one has the sense that just beneath the lucid surface of her prose lies a fierce concentration of experience, salvaged from an unusually peripatetic life yet so thoroughly pondered, plumbed, and assimilated that it renders up the exact quintessence of a long vanished moment with startled urgency.
Precisely.
Genuinely eminent ...
... Joseph Epstein on The story of George Eliot's 'Daniel Deronda'. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The role of the Jews, as George Eliot understood it, and as Himmelfarb underscores, was a combination of separation and communication. They were to remain, through their religion and sense of peoplehood, separate, but always a people with much to communicate to the rest of the world. In a brilliant passage toward the end of The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot, Himmelfarb writes that Daniel Deronda, published well before the Holocaust and the founding of Israel, before the Dreyfus Affair and the pogroms in Eastern Europe, "reminds us that Israel is not merely a refuge for desperate people, that the history of Judaism is more than the bitter annals of persecution and catastrophe, and that Jews are not only, certainly not essentially, victims, survivors, martyrs, or even an abused or disaffected people." George Eliot's great prescient point is that, as Himmelfarb notes, it was not anti-Semitism but "Judaism, the religion and the people, that created the Jew. And it was Judaism that created the Jewish state, the culmination of a proud and enduring faith that defined the Jewish 'nation,' uniting Jews even as they were, and as they remain, physically dispersed."
Anticipation ...
... Tied to the tracks. I re-read Maugham's story recently. It's quite good.
On another front: Broadway's no-hitter.
On another front: Broadway's no-hitter.
A chat ...
... with David Orr On how he wields his poetry power.
I met David a couple of years ago. He's a very pleasant and intelligent man.
I met David a couple of years ago. He's a very pleasant and intelligent man.
The latest issue ...
... of The Quarterly Conversation. Check out Scott Esposito's Cormac McCarthy’s Paradox of Choice: One Writer, Ten Novels, and a Career-Long Obsession.
Scott seems somewhat disdainful of the dream comparison, but it made me wonder if that's what I've missed in McCarthy's work. Ingmar Bergman said that his films were dreams. If McCarthy's novels are dream-fictions (like Strindberg's dream plays) then my plausibility objections become moot. On the other hand, comparing them to dreams may be a way of justifying the plausibility problems. Hmm. Anyway, Scott's piece is worth reading.
Thought for the day ...
The Divine Thing that made itself the foundation of the Church does not seem, to judge by his comments on the religious leadership of his day, to have hoped much from officers of a church.- Charles Williams
Speaking of Maugham ...
... Somerset Maugham: No good deed (1917).
Syrie did quite well on her own, however: The Modern British Interior Designer - Syrie Maugham.
Of course, Jersey City under such circumstances seems an especially inauspicious site for nuptials.
Syrie did quite well on her own, however: The Modern British Interior Designer - Syrie Maugham.
Of course, Jersey City under such circumstances seems an especially inauspicious site for nuptials.
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