… Bob Dylan: Mr. Tambourine Man.
Bob Dylan was born on this date in 1941.
… the liberal editorial board blasted the Catholic leader for "punishing" Pelosi, instead of "right-wing politicians" who "[vote] against health care or funding for the poor."
Abortion is considered by the Catholic Church to be murder, a violation of the fifth commandment. There is no Catholic doctrine regarding the politics of heath care, the Catholic Charities has been praised for giving a greater percentage of what it collects to those in need than anyother charity. The archbishop is obligated to deny communion to anyone lobbies for something in opposition to Catholic doctrine. It is called scandal. I doubt if the Pope will give a damn what the Examiner has to say on the matter. Obviously, the religion of the editors of the Examiner is politics. Pathetic. Plenty of people do not agree with the Church about abortion. That is their right. The just can’t consider themselves Catholic.
“12 years of Catholic school, altar boy, family deeply involved in our church, and never saw anyone banned from receiving communion," Scuitto said. "This is a deep fissure in the church — and a position Pope Francis himself doesn’t support."
I suspect he didn’t do all that well in religion class. Is he still practicing the faith? Seems like he could sure in hell use some. I had four years of theology at a Jesuit college
I see that Whoopi Goldberg has weighed in on this, telling the Archbishop “this not your job, dude.’ Sorry Whoopi, that is his job.
I
… There have been dozens of biographies of Keats and about as many critical introductions as you would care to read, but Miller’s Keats is different in a couple of useful ways. The nine chapters are keyed to the poems, which are roughly sequential, starting with “Chapman’s Homer” in 1816 and ending with “Bright star!” composed in 1820. The volume ends with a short note on Keats’s epitaph on his gravestone in Rome, where he died in 1821. Each poem is quoted in full at the beginning of the chapter, followed by Miller’s biographical and contextual commentary.
I feel obligated to point out that Chaucer wrote in Middle English, not Old English, which was Anglo-Saxon.
In his essay, “Can Poetry Matter?” (1991), Gioia rankled many vested interests when he called attention to the ill-formed poetry produced in reams by America’s academic establishment. “Seeing so much mediocre verse not only published but praised, slogging through so many dull anthologies and small magazines, most readers … now assume,” he wrote, “that no significant new poetry is being written. This public skepticism represents the final isolation of verse as an art form in contemporary society.” Yet in “Autumn Inaugural,” he relents and treats his refractory critics to a lesson in song. He practices what he preaches. If they will not concede the points he makes in his essay, they might at least listen to his music, a music replete with form’s enrapturing alchemy.
The first two lines of “The Road” are slightly misquoted. They should read:
He noticed then that no one chose the way—
All seemed to drift by some collective will.
… Wittgenstein’s thought steadily undermines middle-class individualism. We are not isolated beings sealed within our own private, incommunicable experience. On the contrary, the way in which I come to know you is pretty much the way in which I come to know myself. How can I know that what I am feeling is jealousy unless I have been reared within a language which contains the concept? And language is nobody’s private property. Behind this distaste for the cult of the individual one can feel the disdain of aristocratic Vienna for the stout burgher.
This sounds a little, since Wittgenstein sounds like quite an individualist himself.
They tells us that EFA “stands against oppression, racism, and the exploitation of humans, non-humans, and the land.” Art itself goes unmentioned but “art practices” that agitate for “accountability, reform, equity, justice, and abolition” are grant-worthy. EFA commits to training young adult social justice warriors to organize against “mass incarceration and the police state.” Naturally, EFA means in the U.S., not countries like Myanmar, Cuba, or China.
My lady friends — and I have a few — regard me as male. I go along with them. But bear in mind my friend Katherine and I had power for a gay couple. So we’re obviously not homophobic. Just ordinary people.
But as word of the original letter spread people were outraged. By the end of October, the NSBA had apologized for “some of the language” in the letter. But the apology was too little, too late. Within days five state school board associations had withdrawn from the NSBA. By December the number of state associations leaving the national organization reached seventeen. That represented about 40% of the NSBA’s annual dues. By January the number had climbed to 19 and the Washington Post reported the NSBA was on the verge of a total collapse
… Book Review: 'The Dumbest Generation Grows Up' Explains Higher Education Failures | National Review.My favorite chapter in the book is the one on “the psychological novel.” Using an Orson Wells film, novels by Graham Green and Sherwood Anderson, and other resources, Bauerlein explains in powerful and illuminating ways how cultural treasures at once deepen the soul and shatter utopian illusions. It’s a rich and fascinating way of understanding the link between literature and politics, and well worth your time.
Eliot wasn’t trying to dismiss Marx so much as draw a connection between Shakespeare and Groucho, Siegel argues; in his imperfect way, the poet was offering Marx “subtle homage to his intellect.” Their encounter has the feel of a tragic Modernist fable about the impossibility of communication; two radically different men—one an iconoclast, the other an elitist—both geniuses in their respective domains, forever blown about on the winds of their own insecurity and anger.
Here’s where, in my best curmudgeonly style, I say that Aubrey’s time (or, more broadly, the long aftermath of the Reformation) is not so different from our own. Of course, human nature being a constant, no time or culture can be entirely alien to any other, but perhaps there are special parallels between England in the seventeenth century and life in the Anglophone West today.
He is so acute an observer of social trends that he sometimes appears almost prophetic: He foresaw the terrorist attack in Bali and the advent of the gilets jaunes in France. He has long held that the threat of Islamism to the West comes not so much from Islamism itself, with its nugatory intellectual resources, but from the weakness, the doubts, the cowardice, and the venality of Western society’s response, itself the result of the spiritual vacuity from which the West suffers and which he describes so well, without—of course—offering a solution (it is not the place of novelists to be constructive, except in the sense that criticism is the first stage of taking thought for the morrow).
I will be reading this as soon as the English translation is available. I think Houellebecq is the great contemporary novelist. I may just reread some of his books or get one I haven’t read.
Mere days after a racist and anti-Semitic teenager shot up a supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y., members of the notorious “Squad” have introduced a blatantly anti-Semitic resolution calling on the federal government to describe Israel’s founding with the Palestinian term “Nakba,” which means “catastrophe.”
I often think of the opening of Genesis, with the Creator shaping a universe out of nothing. Then streams of molecular light bounding about, then the forms beginning to take shape, but only as word connects to word and line to line. And always, the effort to make it new, to move on to the next step in the journey.
Orwell had gotten his essential currency of beliefs and valuations from traditional English culture, whose nineteenth-century and subsequent capitalist-imperialist developments he documented, despised, and critiqued with great eloquence in his novels and expository prose works. The culture he loved was represented by writers such as Shakespeare, Swift, Dickens, and Chesterton, not by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, or Stalin—or even by H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. In 1936, when he tried to get a letter of recommendation to fight in Spain from Harry Pollitt, the leader of Great Britain's Communist Party, he was turned down. In Spain he fought the fascists (and was badly wounded) but was horrified by the communist purges of fellow Spanish Republicans, including the party of anarchists in whose ranks he was serving. Orwell’s documentary account of his experience in Homage to Catalonia was not initially popular, but Trilling’s 1952 introduction to an American edition did much to make Orwell’s modern reputation, and not only in America.
This is my daughter Gwen’s new business site. The birthstone ring she made for me many years ago, complete with a fire opal, is often noticed, especially if the sun strikes. Gwen is a licensed gemologist.
John Gross, theater critic and from 1974 to 1981 editor of The Times Literary Supplement, has compiled a wonderfully rich compendium. Nobody reads an anthology; that’s not what it’s for. It is a book for the bedside table. It is a definition and illustration of its subject. The Oxford Books (of Dreams, of Literary Anecdotes, presumably, in time, of everything under the sun—one on Money is in the works) are medieval (or Victorian) in their enterprise: a diligent editor’s selection (“anthology” means in Greek a bouquet, or garland, of flowers) of what many writers have most sharply said about a topic. The Oxford Book of Sunsets would not greatly surprise me, though it might indicate that they are getting near the bottom of the barrel
Orwell was suspicious of pleasure and especially of ease. The pivotal decision of his life was to decline the scholarship to Oxford that would have gained him admission to England’s elite in favor of an especially unpromising post as a colonial police officer in Burma. The choices he made after that—to live a tramp’s life, “down and out” on the streets of Paris and London; to fight for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War; and ultimately to turn against his former comrades on the Stalinist left—all seem like a coda to the first.
My blogging will be spotty today. My youngest daughter is going to be moving in with me thia afternoon and I still have much to do.
J.R.R. Tolkien and G.K. Chesterton, two great champions of the modern fantasy genre, understood literary creation, and art in general, as somehow expressing God’s creativity in the world. Alison Milbank has written the book Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians exploring the work of these towering figures. In this interview, we delve into how beautiful art, and specifically great works of fiction, can kindle in us a sense for the mystery of beauty, until the whole world resembles a grand work of art
While the Soviet Union presented a single, state-enforced tribe, our COVID-era tribes are largely dispersed. Even though certain views of the disease received a state imprimatur through the CDC recommendations, there were many contesting views of the virus from the beginning. Everyone instantly became a scientific expert by deciding which set of scientific authorities were the only true scientists. When the scientists at the CDC and the scientists who signed the Great Barrington declarationdisagreed, everyone knew which group was the real scientists and which group was people just engaged in political theater. Suddenly, everyone had scientific expertise on biology and mathematical models of infectious diseases and thus knew which set of scientists were right. It was only the other side that was denying the science.
During the nineteen-tens and twenties, Millay achieved the kind of fame that was unusual for a poet then and unthinkable now. Before the age of the movie star, she became America’s first starlet. Her books of poems sold out their print runs. She wrote feverishly, working on short stories, plays, a libretto, a novel. She was photographed and interviewed; she was invited to lecture; she won the Pulitzer Prize and became rich. When she published the sonnet sequence “Fatal Interview” (1931), which was inspired by an affair with the much younger poet George Dillon, it sold fifty thousand copies, Great Depression be damned.