Wednesday, August 17, 2022
Up close and personal …
… Artist Explores the Beauty of Birds in an Online Exhibition. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
RIP
… Mary Helen Scriver | Obituaries | cutbankpioneerpress.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Dave also sends along:
How many have you read?
… Ranked: The 50 best books of the past 100 years — do you agree? (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Somehing to think on …
It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling.
— V. S. Naipaul, born on this date in 1932
Tuesday, August 16, 2022
In case you wondered …
… Why Americans are increasingly dubious about going to college..
… while the pandemic certainly made things worse, the downturn took hold well before it started. Demographics alone cannot explain the scale of this drop. And statistics belie the argument that recent high school graduates are getting jobs instead of going to college: Workforce participation for 16- to 24-year-olds is lower than it wasbefore Covid hit, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or BLS, reports.
Maybe it has something to do with today’s colleges and universities not being worth attending. Oh, you get credentials, but you don’t really know much.
Talk about conspiracy theory …
… The Extremist Gun Culture Trying to Co-Opt the Rosary - The Atlantic.
They don’t want rosaries to get into the hands of Catholics who oppose abortion.
Well, I say the rosary every day and I also oppose abortion. But I’m not planning to assault anybody.
Something to think on …
Intellectuals say simple things in difficult ways. Artists say difficult things in simple ways.
— Charles Bukowski, born on this date in 1920
Monday, August 15, 2022
RIP …
… Died: Frederick Buechner, Popular Christian ‘Writer’s Writer’ and ‘Minister’s Minister’. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The answer, he said, was simply this: “Listen to your life.”
See also: A Shelf Called Remember: How Frederick Buechner Built Up My Faith.
When I started reading, what caught my attention was a serious Christian who seemed to see what I could feel but couldn’t really articulate: that life is a mystery, a mystery that’s a plotline, a plotline that connects us with the story of Jesus.
These stories, he wrote, “meet as well as diverge, our stories and his, and even when they diverge, it is his they diverge from, so that even by his absence as well as by his presence in our lives, we know who he is and who we are and who we are not.”
This is important …
…
… the finest words of all, demonstrating how morbid it all was, came from a man dead for 10 years. In the first rounds of the fatwa, Christopher Hitchens had tirelessly stumped for Rushdie. Now, in this latest, unexpected round, Hitchens was summoned from his grave. All weekend, videos of him defending Rushdie were shared, videos where Hitchens spoke with an unimaginable frankness, videos where he spoke with more force, more intelligence, and more authority than anybody alive today.
Blogging note …
I have to head out shortly to Wills Eye Hospital to see about the state of my cataracts. Will resume blogging sometime later.
Sunday, August 14, 2022
Something to think on …
Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem.
— John Galsworthy, born on this date in 1867
Saturday, August 13, 2022
Sounds good to me …
… Defund the FBI.
Did we say defund? Yes. But we don’t mean simply to cut its funding, as leftists have disastrously proposed for police forces across the country. We mean tear down the entire rotting edifice of the FBI and replacing it with a new agency that respects the Constitution and holds itself accountable to all Americans, not just the woke far left.
I don’t know when the FBI decided to be our version of the KGB, but I don’t like it and want something done about it.
Listen in …
… Dana Gioia on Christianity and Poetry | R. R. Reno | First Things. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.7
Editor R. R. Reno is joined by Dana Gioia to talk about his article from the August/September issue, “Christianity and Poetr.
Something to think on …
You cannot imagine at all how much you interest God; He is interested in you as if there were no one else on earth.
— Julien Green, who died on this date in 1998
Friday, August 12, 2022
Philly’s Soros DA …
… Krasner's Eviction Of Reporter Unprecedented & Unconstitutional | Big Trial | Philadelphia Trial Blog. (Hat tip, Paul Davis.)
"Krasner is engaging in unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination against you," wrote Mark Zecca, a former senior attorney in city of Philadelphia's Law Department.
In case you wondered …
… Here’s Why John Updike Designed His Own Book Covers. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Updike was deeply invested in the form his words would take. In a speech accepting the National Book Foundation medal, he described the dizzy happiness of seeing his words in print and credited Harry Ford, the designer of his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, for the “delicious striped jacket and an elegant page format, in the typeface called Janson, that I have stuck with for over forty books since.”
Something to think on …
Faith is not belief. Belief is passive. Faith is active.
— Edith Hamilton, born on this date in 1867
Thursday, August 11, 2022
Appreciation …
… The Poetic Life of Samuel Menashe - The Millions (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
In his later years, Menashe sometimes seemed rueful about his lack of recognition, even as he marveled over his long overdue accolades and the legacy they granted to his work. In a 2005 interview with Adam Travis of the Poetry Foundation, he said that his had been “the opposite of a life buttressed by grants and having a publisher and going to him every few years with new poems. Each time I’ve had to start from scratch.” When asked if there were any merits to obscurity, his reply could not have been more emphatic: “NO! No, no, no, no, no! You want your work to be read. Obscurity means you’re not read.”
Something to think on …
… The roots of art and play lie very close together.
— Angus Wilson, born on this date in 1913
Wednesday, August 10, 2022
Something to think on …
What is philosophy for the Catholic but the way intelligence lives its faith?
— Don Colacho
Tuesday, August 09, 2022
Well, where was Luther from …
… Germany’s “Synodal Path” Takes the Church Toward Disaster.
Since the Second Vatican Council, so much been done in an attempt to “bring the Church closer to the faithful.” In the process, the progressivists strip Holy Mother Church of everything that could represent sacredness and hierarchy
Coming to the big screen …
… James Marsh to Direct Samuel Beckett Biopic 'Dance First' - Variety. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Titled after Beckett’s famous ethos on life “Dance first, think later,” the film is a sweeping account of the life of this icon of 20th-century literature.
Something to think on …
Poetry should begin with emotion in the poet, and end with the same emotion in the reader. The poem is simply the instrument of transference.
— Philip Larkin, born on this date in 1922
Monday, August 08, 2022
What can I say?
… Tis very sad news: David McCullough has died..
The afternoon I spent with him was unforgettable. He was a sweet and brilliant. They’re having a fgreat time in heaven now.r
Something to think on …
Time is a kind friend, he will make us old.
— Sara Teasdale, born on this date in 1884
Sunday, August 07, 2022
Good to know …
… Contrary To The Conventional Wisdom, Data Shows Christianity Is NOT Disappearing From America - HillFaith.
“The research has shown that Gen Z is one of the least Christian [generations] … It does raise questions as to, ‘is there a real relationship between the amount of religious identification and the mental health problems that we see in Gen Z?’ And of course there’s a whole host of other factors, but from my perspective and spiritual understanding, I would say there is certainly a significant relationship there.”
Hmm …
… Mark Twain took notice of the writer of awful poems.
Wikipedia calls Twain a self-described fan of Moore’s. She was apparently an influence on Ogden Nash.
A great painter …
… The Catholic Art of George Tooker - The Catholic Thing. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Tooker never complained about neglect. He was too absorbed by his own contrarian passions. When other young painters followed Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock, Tooker studied the Italian Renaissance master Piero della Francesca. When the leading critics praised abstract formalism, Tooker emphasized content. His central concern was never style. It was the human condition.I can’t remember when I first encountered Tooker’s paintings, but for me it was love at first sight. Here was a painter who saw the world as it is and didn’t play games.
A prophet for these days …
… Quo Vadis, America? | The Russell Kirk Center. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
When addressing the issue of freedom, Sheen notes that the common interpretation of the word is “one’s ability to do anything they wish to do.” Sheen writes that this is not true freedom but rather a pseudo-freedom. True freedom, according to Sheen, is the ability to do what one ought to do, not ability to do what one wants to do.
Something to think on …
Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark.
— Rabindranath Tagore, who died on this date in 1941
Saturday, August 06, 2022
Poetry and romance …
… ‘Eliot After “The Waste Land”’ Review: As Prufrock Grew Old. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
After Vivien’s death, Eliot had written to Emily that he was shocked “to discover that I recoiled violently from the prospect of marriage.” Wrestling with the issue he declares: “I cannot, cannot, start life again, and adapt myself . . . to any other person. I do not think that I could survive it, as a person; I cannot bear the company of any one person for very long without extreme irritation and suppression.”
Essential to faith …
… The Charge of Poetry ~ The Imaginative Conservative. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The Holy Spirit moves through Scripture and prayer, and yet we gloss over familiar phrases and images as though we already understood them.
Something to think on …
All that passes is raised to the dignity of expression; all that happens is raised to the dignity of meaning. Everything is either symbol or parable.
— Paul Claudel, born on this date in 1868
Friday, August 05, 2022
Master of resignation …
… Larkin in America | City Journal. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… why should Americans read Larkin? An instrumental answer might be that he used our common language so beautifully. The English-speaking world is a kind of community, after all. Larkin sought to rescue English poetry from the habit of expressing, through convention, things unfelt and half-meant. He wanted to tether poetic language to everyday speech. He was a tremendously deliberate writer, for whom a poem’s gestation might take a decade; his patterning was complex but made to seem simple.
A chronicle of failure …
… Fauci messing up monkeypox just like COVID, Ebola and AIDS.
“The CDC was supposed to have spent the last 2+ decades preparing for the specific scenario of ‘What if someone resurrects Smallpox and releases it as a bioweapon’. Now, when faced with a virus that is literally ‘Story Mode Smallpox’ they fail,” researcher Nicholas Weaver observes. Monkeypox “is not hyper-virulent,” he notes, and vaccines, treatments and techniques, such as contact tracing, designed for smallpox work just as well. Yet the CDC has “failed, completely and utterly, to prevent this growing.”
Something to think on …
I can think of nothing more gallant, even though again and again we fail, than attempting to get at the facts; attempting to tell things as they really are. For at least reality, though never fully attained, can be defined. Reality is that which, when you don’t believe in it, doesn’t go away.
— Peter Viereck, born on this date in 1916
A monk’s attentiveness …
… Poetry as Prayer | Peter J. Leithart | First Things. (Hat tip, Dave lull.)
Most of Steven’s tales are simple, hardly worth the telling. But they’re the kind of tales that are the texture of life, like the stories we recount at the dinner table. Steven’s stories stay with us, moments that remind us of the small delights and instant tragedies of life.
Thursday, August 04, 2022
Well worth remembering …
… Religion Is a Feature, not a Flaw | Josh Holdenried | First Things.
In his farewell address to the nation, President George Washington warned against the expulsion of religion from public life, declaring that we should “with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”
Something to think on …
Every intellectual product must be judged from the point of view of the age and the people in which it was produced.
— Walter Pater, born on this date in 1839
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